The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

Product Information

Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said 'Je sous demande pardon," and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well. This one sounds pretty appealing, and your high rating is very encouraging; also, as I loved Rebecca, I’m happy to see there are perhaps some similarities between the two! This is a disturbing tale, and it comes as no surprise to learn how emotionally drained and disturbed the author was on its completion. When she wrote about the character Françoise needing a blood transfusion, in real life shortly afterwards, her daughter Tessa gave birth to a son who needed two blood transfusions.

The novel certainly gives the reader food for thought but, from my point of view, something is missing in the story. Although Jekyll became subsumed and ultimately destroyed by the malignant influence of Hyde, John conversely seems to become more self-possessed and confident through his exploration of his darker self. Together with a typed letter on headed notepaper addressed to Ivor Brown, the publisher, and his wife Irene, thanking them for the gift of his latest book, 'Dark Ladies', and enclosing a copy of her most recent book, 'The Scapegoat'.A story that examines identity and fate in a thoughtful way, written in the author's elegant but provoking pen.

I loved the rural French setting and I’m thinking about The Glass-Blowers – I’ll look out for your review, and I think Ali might be reading it, too. John gets himself entangled in a play of another’s making and is becoming both an actor and a director: “As a stranger I was like a spectator at a play, but I was also in a sense a producer too: circumstances were forcing them to follow my lead, and upon my actions would depend their own” [du Maurier, 1957: 236]. He goes from having no life or ties to being responsible for the complexities of a chateaux and the lives that revolve around it, and he finds out that the life he has assumed is one of a dubious and sometimes cruel individual.

From the neglected pregnant wife and the hostile elder sister to the resentful younger brother and the religious ten-year-old daughter, every character is well-drawn and memorable. Daphne weaved a compelling tale from the off, from the mystery of the identical men to the shit-show that Jean's life is; but where she excels is the intricacies of the extended family's life and history; the multiple distinct voices and relationships with Jean, and then John, and just overall taking a superb suspense thriller and making it much more, very much more! And another biographer, Margaret Forster, reprints a letter, which Daphne du Maurier wrote in the same year of The Scapegoat's publication, 1957, just after her (Daphne's) husband Tommy had had a nervous breakdown.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I don’t fancy all of them, but I’d put this up there with Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel and above Jamaica Inn which was a bit too disturbing for me!

I do not reveal the end in other novels or short stories by Daphne du Maurier because there is a final twist. I dragged myself to my feet, and with my hell-hound in tow started off once more through the vastness of the wood, feeling, as the poet did before me, that my companion would be with me through the nights and through the days, and down the arches of the years, and I should never be rid of him.

A dozen years have passed since the Occupation and there is still friction between those who were members of the Resistance and the collaborators. Their resemblance to each other is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking - until at last John falls into a drunken stupor. Take a look around you, at all those vast legions of cynical, weary, burnt-out souls - lost in their private hells. He is certainly going to have his hands full as there is much to do if he is to right this particular ship.I wish the ending could have been different, but how could it have been, really (I see this is what I thought of “True Biz”, too, that very different novel: how interesting! Theory is 'serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one's positive self-image.