The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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You will need to seriously suspend disbelief for this story as it’s highly implausible and yet it had me intrigued from start to finish. I think that is credit to the author’s unique writing ability. I adored the descriptive element of the novel, the characters are flawed and dislikable ( apart from one or two) which was an element I really enjoyed. The story is suspenseful and atmosphere and reading this over the Halloween period cosied up by the fire was my perfect transition into wintertime here in Ireland. I just looked at an Excel database I have kept for some 15 years or so and have discovered I read this in 2001. How could I forget reading this book??? It’s like I read it for the first time today! In fact you can see from my review above I was assuming this was the first tine I had laid eyes on this book. I know some books are certainly worth reading two times��but yeesh. Maybe I should be taking a buttload of Prevogen. After all, it contains an ingredient found in jellyfish. Or so the ad says…I wonder if jellyfish have good memories? Apparently they have better memories than I.🤨 What would you do if you came face to face with yourself? That's what happens to John, an Englishman on holiday in France, when he meets his exact double - a Frenchman called Jean de Gue. John agrees to go for a drink with Jean but falls into a drunken stupor and wakes up in a hotel room to find that Jean has disappeared, taking John's clothes and identity documents with him! But - to her - it seemed the perfect Christmas gift for my young self! I never knew WHY until I finally started to read it, sixty-odd years later (thanks to my friend Sara’s recommendation on GR)! It's hard to praise this movie without stating what a feel good wonderful ending this movie has. It's so neat and satisfying. Liked the country house where it was filmed - stately but not too ostentatious.

While contemporary writers were dealing critically with such subjects as the war, alienation, religion, poverty, Marxism, psychology and art, and experimenting with new techniques such as the stream of consciousness, du Maurier produced 'old-fashioned' novels with straightforward narratives that appealed to a popular audience's love of fantasy, adventure, sexuality and mystery. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories. Due to his depression - he walked the streets at night in the rain and knew he must get drunk. He also was thinking of spending a few days at a monastery in hopes of finding the courage to go on living before returning to England. Nobody writes romantic gothic fiction like du Maurier. She knows how to make something subtle important. She has great command of the psychological thriller and weaves her tales to that you are never far from the edge of your seat. She writes descriptions that turn buildings into characters, and characters that emerge as real people. His alter ego, Jean de Gué, was a count with a castle he didn’t care for, a marriage he called a trap, “too many possessions — human ones.” The ate and drank together, the wily Frenchman feeling out his double. John is the first-person narrator – he is a university history lecturer from England, visiting France. In Le Mans, he happens upon his doppelgänger. Not just somebody who looks a bit like him, but somebody exactly like him. They even have the same voice, and John’s French is so good that this other man – Jean de Gué – didn’t realise John was English. They start drinking together… and eventually so drunk, or perhaps drugged, that John passes out in Jean’s hotel room.John, our narrator, is a lonely academic, someone who always felt like an observer rather than a participant in life. Jean, on the other hand, describes himself as a "family man" who evidently doesn't enjoy the title and is only too happy to jump ship. John is leading a drifting, meaningless life. Until... he meets his Shadow, the evil Frenchman Jean - his Exact Double. It is an old-fashioned, psychologically excavated classic in its almost fantastic organization. I do not reveal the end in other novels or short stories by Daphne du Maurier because there is a final twist. The Scapegoat is a hidden gem buried deep within Du Maurier’s chest of treasure. Prepare to be astounded. Which doesn’t mean this novel is not good — I think it’s pretty damn good. And I am glad I read it. 😊

Or, have many people counting on you - wife - mother - daughter - brother - sister-in-law- friends with benefits - business associates- and feel resentful? He thinks the only motive force in human nature is "GREED". People in Jean de Gue's life were never satisfied--[from his point of view]. I wondered how much further I had to fall, and if the sense of shame that overwhelmed me was merely wallowing in darkness... I had played the coward long enough." The story follows John, who tries his best to live his doppelgänger's life without making too many missteps or being discovered as a fraud. Turns out, the life he is to assume is a complicated one. Suddenly, he's a man with a depressed wife, a crumbling chateau, a failing glass foundry, a mistress in town, a mistress in the house, a sister who hasn't spoken to him in fifteen years, a troubled daughter and mysteriously ill mother. Plus a dark history that no one dares to speak of. At one point halfway through the novel, John feels that he is trapped in a corner. He feels impotent, and that whatever he does will not work; he is sinking further and further into a morass of his own making. The author describes the scene outside the house,drunk and when he awakes, he discovers a chauffeur at the door: 'Monsieur le Comte is awake at last?' She imagined herself suddenly transported into their midst, listening to their conversation, perhaps even becoming one of them," It’s also beautifully written. I’ve never seen du Maurier better at the incidental metaphor, descriptions of people and places, and above all subtle and precise descriptions of how John feels and responds. John, an English lecturer in French history, is on holiday in France. In Le Mans, he meets a French count, Jean de Gué, who looks and sounds exactly like him. As the two drink together, John confesses that he is depressed, feeling as though his outward life is a meaningless façade, and the pair move on to a hotel where John passes out. Next day he wakes to find his clothes and possessions gone, with Jean's chauffeur urging him to get dressed (in Jean's clothes which are left for him) and come home to the ancestral château.

Du Maurier’s skill creates as much suspense in The Scapegoat as it did in Rebecca. Her characters are linked by dependency, hostilely, old hatreds, and money. Carefully, John listens and digests remarks, cautious not to denounce the absent Jean and so reveal himself to this accepting family. I drove to the network of roads at the top of the town, turned left, and took the road to Bellême and Mortagne' (p.368). Even the structure of this one sentence gives the impression of hurtling towards doom. It does not let up; there is no break.If only life were this simple. If only human relationships were straightforward, with little or no difficulties, no web of intricacies to disentangle. John, as the new Comte Jean de Gué, finds himself taking on a failing business and a family with secrets and complex feelings. John will come to know Jean through this family and his interactions with them. Jean may not be the kind of person our narrator would wish to emulate if given a choice. But isn’t he somehow responsible for these people now that he has allowed himself to be an accomplice to this deception? Does he want Jean to fail because he feels a victim in this charade? Perhaps John is Jean de Gué’s scapegoat, or maybe another is fulfilling this role in the drama that plays out in this wounded family. The film makes no mention of the earlier murder of Maurice Duval. The incident in which John deliberately burns his hand to avoid taking part in the shoot does not occur in the film, nor does his wife's fall from the bedroom window or her subsequent death. In the film, Spence surreptitiously enters the house during the shoot and manipulates Frances into taking an overdose of morphine. Standing arrives in time to save her.

The Scapegoat is a 1957 novel by Daphne du Maurier. In 1959, it was made into a film of the same name, starring Sir Alec Guinness. It was also the basis of a film broadcast in 2012 starring Matthew Rhys and written and directed by Charles Sturridge. One had no right to play with other people's lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. A word, a look, a smile, a frown, did something to another human being, waking response or aversion, and a web was woven which had no beginning and no end, spreading outward and inward too, merging, entangling, so that the struggle of one depended on the struggle of the other." Just as an actor paints old lines upon a young face, or hides behind the part he must create, so the old anxious self that I knew too well could be submerged and forgotten, and the new self would be someone without a care, without responsibility, calling himself Jean de Gué... "Matthew Rhys of 'the Americans' is a good actor and it's quaint to hear him speak with a British accent since he is more well know internationally always playing an American. chauffeur believes him to be drunk and when he enquires after the 'gentleman I was with last night' (p.30) the hotel receptionist has no knowledge of him. John decides that if 'he whether he will inherit the money if she dies. '"What happens if I die? You get everything, don't you?" "You're not going to die"'