The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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Having enjoyed many Daphne du Maurier books, The Scapegoat comes as a big disappointment. The premise of a stolen identity and the deception that followed sounded fantastic and was too inviting to pass. But now, I wish I had. 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.

The novel hurtles to its conclusion, within its short compressed time-frame, as John desperately tries to right the wrongs as he sees them. Increasingly he is more committed, yet contrarily also more unsure, The basic plot is that a Frenchman in his early 40s runs into another man, an Englishman in his early 40s, who is a body double of him (doppelgänger). By clever means and not to his liking the Englishman finds himself forced to impersonate the Frenchman and inherits the Frenchman’s life and family…a brother and a sister and a mother and they’re all messed up to varying degrees, and a wife, and she is unhappy because her husband has been essentially ignoring her and only married her for a potential buttload of money if she produces a son for him (complicated legal arrangement regarding her dowry). Oh and that’s just the beginning…he inherits a precocious 11-year old daughter, a sister-in-law (who he is having an affair with), a valet, a mistress, a glass factory that is floundering… And given this is a du Maurier novel there have been sinister things happening well into the past…that this Englishman now fake Frenchman is going to have to deal with. Perhaps vaguely reminiscent of ‘Heaven Can Wait’, a film from the late 1970s starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie (and a gaggle of other good actors)…although that was a comedy/love story when push comes to shove. Not a whole lot to laugh at in this novel. In fact nothing really. I walked on through darkness, undergrowth and moss, and now I had no present and no past, the self who stumbled had no heart and mind..." Not since Rebeccahas Daphne du Maurier written a novel so full of the sense of mounting excitement, of a “wanting to know what is going to happen.” Anyone that has ever hungered to be a part of a group, but yet always felt as a stranger, will relate to John here. What should happen, however, if you had the opportunity to take someone’s place? Would you do it? When John bumps into an exact likeness of himself in a tavern, he is given precisely this chance. While John is a lonely man with a feeling of emptiness inside, Comte Jean de Gué claims to have only the problem of having too many ‘human’ possessions. Jean wants to play a clever game – that of switching identities with John and assuming each other’s lives. When John wakes the next morning, stripped of his own clothes and everything he had on his person, what choice does he have but to put on another man’s clothes, take his suitcase and assume this new life?The secret of life is to recognize the fact early on, and become reconciled. Then it no longer matters". Seven days is all John got but what was accomplished in those seven days was remarkable changes for the whole family of Comte de Gué of St. Gilles and the family business of Verrerie (glass-work) and which all members reside in the stately Chateau. I wanted Jean to be so egotistical, so rapacious, so monstrous that he would lose his family for good! I could not ask for forgiveness for something I had not done. As scapegoat, I could only bear the fault.

I really wasn't expecting to get completely hooked to this story, but after a certain point that was exactly what happened and I didn't care about anything other than what was going to happen next at St. Gilles!The story has been the basis of two films: one in 1959 starring Alec Guinness and Bette Davis and one in 2012 starring Matthew Rhys.