The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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We suspect Renée's behaviour, for example, before John seems to have an inkling of why she seems so overly flirtatious and petulant. A life with a precocious daughter, a heavily pregnant wife, lots of adultery, an ailing mother, unhappy siblings,a failing company and a village still struggling with the demons of a NAZI occupied past and how they dealt with the collaborators 15 years ago.

seeping down the walls, swirling in the runways, choking and gurgling above the gargoyle head, driving sideways like arrows to the windows, stinging the panes.

She apparently wrote it at record speed, finishing within six months, and then collapsed with nervous exhaustion.

He faces one moral dilemma after another, and though his actions seem benign he quite inadvertently causes harm. De Winter in Rebecca or the tour guide brother in Flight of the Falcon, this narrator is a person without any sense of importance, sense of self or sense of his own value. While on holidays in France, he finds himself in the place of a doppelgänger and feels strangely compelled to hold up to that almost untenable situation. It provides neither the delicious twist we have learnt to expect from this author, nor the massive ambiguity she can do so well. Instead, she lets it fall into monotony with the dull narrative of the story from the victim, John's, point of view.Du Maurier explores that idea here, through the characters of John (the English man) and Jean (the French man) who meet by chance one night and discover that while they might be strangers, they look exactly alike. I've come across many dislikable characters in Daphne du Maurier's books, but I've not met a bunch like in here, not quite. Evil Jean conks him out with booze, changes John's identity into his own privileged, noble one- then exits, stage right. I wanted Jean to be so egotistical, so rapacious, so monstrous that he would lose his family for good! One of the triggers was that while out for a walk in a square in a French town, Daphne du Maurier saw a man who looked identical to someone she happened to know.

Theory is 'serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one's positive self-image. Archives Archives Tags Art Biography Book List Book Review Books Book Tag Classical Music Classics Debut Novel Detective Fiction Fantasy Fiction French Literature Historical Fiction History Horror Italian Literature Japan Japanese Books Japanese Literature Literary Fiction Music Mystery Non-Fiction Novella Paintings Philip K. 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.

Events in Daphne du Maurier's own life were mirrored within the novel, and the author became increasingly jittery and confused as to which had actually happened first. Finally, John apologizes to Blanche for Jean's past actions and asks her to run the glassworks in his place.