The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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John, our narrator, is a lonely academic, someone who always felt like an observer rather than a participant in life.

In Rebecca, on the other hand, du Maurier fuses psychological realism with a sophisticated version of the Cinderella story.The smell of the soil, the gleam of the wet roads, the faded paint of shutters masking windows through which I should never look, the grey faces of houses whose doors I should never enter, were to me an everlasting reproach, a reminder of distance, of nationality. She often drops hints to the reader; clues carefully planted so that the reader is able to puzzle out the various roles and relationships before the viewpoint character John does.

Also, in both Rebecca and in The Scapegoat, people who committed terrible deeds in the past are haunted by their actions and try to use a naïve complete stranger to “get away” from their trauma. I think the hair on the back of my neck would stand up if I walked into a pub and sat down next to a clone of myself.

Feeling that the police will think him mad, feeling in truth somewhat mad, he allows himself to be taken to a rundown chateau in the country, where he is not suspected by anyone in the family. And it ends, as you know, with the problem unsolved, except that the suggestion there, when I finished it, was that the two sides of that man's nature had to fuse together to give birth to a third, well balanced.

This is a disturbing tale, and it comes as no surprise to learn how emotionally drained and disturbed the author was on its completion. He feels impotent, and that whatever he does will not work; he is sinking further and further into a morass of his own making. All Daphne du Maurier's novels are tightly plotted, and this one, like "My Cousin Rachel" is full of suspense, coincidence, hints and dark secrets. I don’t think I ever reviewed this one but I really like it and persuaded my book group to read it about five years ago, which was a reread for me. In this vein, the characters in the story lost all sense of time, and John finds himself in a dream-state where time as we know it almost ceases to matter.

I wanted Jean to be so egotistical, so rapacious, so monstrous that he would lose his family for good! Doppelgängers is probably my favourite theme to read about and I even previously published a list: “Mirror Image”: 7 Books That Focus on Doppelgängers/Doubles.

One thing I noticed and found surprising is that the book is less gothic than the other novels of hers that I've read ( Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel).They have treated him variously with the emotions he has seemed to lack in his life so far; that is with love or hatred, but rarely with indifference. There he meets his doppelgänger's family: Jean's feeble, pregnant wife Françoise and over-imaginative young daughter Marie-Noel; his dull brother Paul and embittered sister Blanche; Paul's frustrated wife (and Jean's mistress) Renée; and Jean's elderly, morphine-addicted mother.