So, what happens when you come face to face with your exact double but wake up the next day only to find that he/she has switched identities with you? You might feel like you have no choice but to play along. Let the chauffeur take you home to a chateau full of depressed and embittered family members. Throw in a couple of religious fanatics just for good measure. Next, you might actually begin to think that you can help these people if you can just avoid detection long enough. I think you're getting the idea. I'm actually still a bit unnerved by this macabre tale and I will be thinking about this thriller for many days, probably weeks. What Daphne du Maurier achieved is a well-crafted and suspenseful mystery that pulled me into the story very swiftly and even though I've closed the cover I still feel like a deer staring into headlights. I can't quite pull myself away from the events and the characters, so I'm at a standstill. The next morning, John woke in a hotel room, the valise of Count De Gué nearby, a solicitous chauffeur waiting to take “his master” home despite protestations. Evidently, Jean was unwilling to go home. There was no evidence that John was other than the count. He began to try to live the role. This story is told by John, an Englishman who teaches French history at the university. 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. As the days pass, we find out, along with John, who is who in the large family of Jean ('Monsieur le Comte'), the relationships between them and the past events that led to the present state of affairs.

Matthew Rhys does an excellent job playing the two men, John the school teacher who had recently lost his job and Johnny the aristocrat who was not well-liked by his own family, and seemed desperate to escape his situation.

My Book Notes

I must admit to feeling a little nervous about taking on this book. Novels of 'a certain age’ really aren’t my thing, I seem to struggle with everything about them. If it's not the stilted or overblown language it is a plot that feels horribly tame and dated. If there’s a phobia attached to reading these books, then I have it. I’d never read a book by Daphne du Maurier before so I wasn’t sure quite which I'd get - the overblown or the stilted - but I was confident the plot would be asinine. And guess what, I was right! But I was also wrong… Jean de Gue's voice changed - its clear he had personal problems too - felt resentment. He said he had a sister who only thinks about religion and nothing else. At one point halfway through the novel, John feels that he is trapped in a corner. He feels impotent, and that whatever he does will not work; he is sinking further and further into a morass of his own making. The author describes the scene outside the house,

In The Scapegoat, her ancestral glass-blowing foundry became the failing business of the de Gué family. They in turn were depicted as more grand, in fact minor aristocrats, the Comte and Comtesse. And instead of writing herself into the story, the author took on the guise of a male narrator, one of five occasions in major novels when she did this. A fluttering sound by the window made me turn my head. It was a butterfly, the last of the long summer, woken by sunshine, seeking escape from the cobwebs that imprisoned it. I released the butterfly from its prison, and it hovered a moment on the sill, then settled once more amongst the cobwebs." 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.

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The ending comes swiftly, too swiftly, and leaves the reader feeling cheated, wishing to tarry a little longer. I for one, could have happily endured a full year with both Jean de Gué one and two to see what the future holds for them and the family. men who look exactly alike, a teacher and a wealthy business man with a complicated personal life and business in trouble meet. The teacher inhabits the life of the business man who disappears. It's quite delightful and perfectly written how he interacts with the family members and romantic entanglements of the wealth man. She imagined herself suddenly transported into their midst, listening to their conversation, perhaps even becoming one of them," 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.

It is my story, and it is Moper's [Tommy her husband] also. We are both doubles. So it is with everyone. Every one of us has his, or her, dark side. Which is to overcome the other? This is the purpose of the book. 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..." and discovers that it is a child who declares: 'I swear to you, that if you don't come to me by the time I count a hundred, I shall throw myself out of the window'But - to her - it seemed the perfect Christmas gift for my young self! I never knew WHY until I finally started to read it, sixty-odd years later (thanks to my friend Sara’s recommendation on GR)! afresh. Already I see signs of it, here in the master's house' (p.343). When the priest leaves, Jean de Gué enters holding a gun and says 'So you planned to get rid of me, did you, and stay in St Gilles?' (p.345). Will John fool them all and turn his madcap Shadow's Evil plans into Good - and finally give his own life purpose in the process? One had no right to play with other people's lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. 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." looks around her at the house and John suddenly realises that 'what she was looking at had once been part of her life'

When John first stepped into Jean de Gue's life, he noticed that his mother looked frightened. His sister silent. His brother hostile. His sister-in-law angry. His wife crying, and his daughter threw a tantrum. The dog, ignored him. is more reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which the two selves are part of the same person. In The Scapegoat, My sense of power was unbounded... I felt my bluff to be superb, and it must have worked... My self-confidence mounting every moment... I recalled my success the night before... little scraps of family history fell on my ear... what I gleaned would have to be sorted and sifted at leisure." The family's glassworks is losing money and faces closure. so John renegotiates a contract to keep it afloat for six months. 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. In the nearest town, John meets Béla, another of Jean's mistresses, who becomes suspicious of his sudden concern for the family and its business. mother off morphine, 'tonight she'll be a raving maniac', and he thinks that John's plan for Renée and Paul will break up their marriage even sooner, 'RenéeThe Scapegoat is a 1957 novel by Daphne du Maurier. In 1959, it was made into a film of the same name, starring Sir Alec Guinness. It was also the basis of a film broadcast in 2012 starring Matthew Rhys and written and directed by Charles Sturridge. One had no right to play about with people’s lives. One should not interfere with their emotions. 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 upon the struggle of the other.” Matthew Rhys of 'the Americans' is a good actor and it's quaint to hear him speak with a British accent since he is more well know internationally always playing an American.