The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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This isn’t a book I recommend to all my friends but if you’ve enjoyed Rebecca or Jamaica Inn or just good old fashioned classic novels then this might well be a good choice for you. There are heart-stopping moments where the readers wonder whether the dog will recognise the supplanted character of John, in the place of César's master, the Count. There’s so much more to this author than just her masterpiece, Rebecca, and you would be missing out if you didn’t immerse yourself in every last bit she had to offer – I know I will! John agrees to go for a drink with Jean but falls into a drunken stupor and wakes up in a hotel room to find that Jean has disappeared, taking John's clothes and identity documents with him!

In fact it is neither a straightforward adventure story as in Anthony Hope's tale, nor a dark study of two individuals; personalities within the same body, as in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic horror story. But isn’t he somehow responsible for these people now that he has allowed himself to be an accomplice to this deception? 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. 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.

Again, less gothic, but satisfying (although I must say, it left me quite curious as to what followed the final page). But the question that really bugs me is why doesn’t anyone seem to notice that he’s not Jean – not his brother, his mother or even his wife and child? Gradually John begins to feel sympathy for the family who have accepted him, John, totally at face value. At an early age, she recognised that her readership was comprised principally of women, and she cultivated their loyal following through several decades by embodying their desires and dreams in her novels and short stories. Instead, she lets it fall into monotony with the dull narrative of the story from the victim, John's, point of view.

Don’t know that one Liz but the reading group read the excellent My Cousin Rachel recently and I used Rebecca in a WEA Romantic Novel course. In Julius and The Parasites, for example, she introduces the image of a domineering but deadly father and the daring subject of incest. I do not reveal the end in other novels or short stories by Daphne du Maurier because there is a final twist. The narrator continually suspects various members of his family - including his doppelgänger - of not only duplicity, but also of some evil deeds in the past. Naturally, they expect him to continue running the family glass-making business and arranging shooting parties - things that John has absolutely no experience in.The conflict is decidedly resolved in the way that works best, though, initially, I was not so sure of that. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thoughts on Papyrus with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

There are fewer of the traditional gothic tropes on display (the house as a main character, ghosts or dead who preoccupy the minds of the characters, letters received from people long dead, animals who meet bad ends, dark eroticism). They too are macabre and strange, tense and chillingly unexpected tales, relying on the same speculative atmosphere of suspense and mystery, both disturbing and uncanny. In The Scapegoat, her ancestral glass-blowing foundry became the failing business of the de Gué family. He learns how his doppelgänger had influenced the destinies of these individuals, mercilessly twisting their lives to his own purpose. They were real, fallible human beings, and as John and I learned more about their past – and about Jean – I understood how their characters and attitude had been formed.Jean then announces that he has sold John's London flat, resigned from his university job, and cleared out his bank account, so John's old self is effectively gone forever. The next day he learns Françoise's dowry is in trust for a male heir, but if she dies or reaches the age of 50 without having had a son, Jean will inherit the money instead.

A escrita é muito boa, a autora é mestra em criar tensão e a leitura tornou-se compulsiva, na ânsia de saber o que passaria a seguir e como iria John desembaraçar-se das várias situações que iam surgindo e, sobretudo, de como se iria resolver esta confusão no final. Gilles and the family business of Verrerie (glass-work) and which all members reside in the stately Chateau.A word, a look, a smile, a frown, did something to another human being, waking response or aversion, and a web was woven which had no beginning and no end, spreading outward and inward too, merging, entangling, so that the struggle of one depended on the struggle of the other.