The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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When Jean's chauffeur arrives at the hotel, John is unable to convince him of what has happened - and ends up accompanying the chauffeur to Jean de Gue's chateau, where the Frenchman's unsuspecting family assume that he really is Jean de Gue. 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. I read The Glass-Blowers this week and so was also thinking about The Scapegoat because both are set in the rural countryside.

John persuades the mother to resume her position at the head of the family and give up the morphine. In this post WWII setting, the three generations live in genteel poverty amid bitterness and a failing glass factory. Jean wants to play a clever game – that of switching identities with John and assuming each other’s lives. I had never heard of this book (originally published in 1957) BUT SEE BELOW …until several months ago it got a favorable review from a GR friend.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. John, as the new Comte Jean de Gué, finds himself taking on a failing business and a family with secrets and complex feelings. 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 leaded guttering was choked with leaves, and when rain came the whole would turn to mud and pour from the gargoyle's mouth in a turbid stream. The exploration of what makes a man and a life, of to what degree a man plays different roles as he live that life, and to what degree good and evil coexist in that man is quite brilliant; and all of that is wrapped up in a cleverly plotted, beautifully written, compulsively readable story.

Daphne du Maurier’s under-read novel deserves much more attention and recognition that it has got so far. wishing to condemn him, it was as if it was the shadow I condemned, the man who had moved and spoken and acted in his place, and not Jean de Gué at all. He has inherited a troubled family, a struggling business, and another life to one side of that, all rooted in and shaped by a history that he knows nothing about. Theory is 'serves as an opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining one's positive self-image. He is so unloved and disconnected that he can assume another man’s life and involve himself immediately in the other man’s world to the point of burying himself inside the other man’s skin.I don’t think it’s strictly about doppelgängers, but I also enjoyed James Hogg’s classics The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which deals with ‘shadow selves’, and James Robertson’s modern take on Hogg, The Testament of Gideon Mack. I found the premise of this story very intriguing and I found I couldn't stop wondering what I would do if I met my exact double. The one man went back home having been given a hint that his family, in future, would be different, would be adjusted; the other man went to the monastery, for a space of time, to learn "what to do with love". Since The Scapegoat is du Maurier’s creation, there is an atmosphere of unease in the story which is connected to one house.