The Scapegoat (Virago Modern Classics)

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I might not had read it had it not been for my reading group picking it as a buddy read and, well, I like to read with those gals. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. In fact you can see from my review above I was assuming this was the first tine I had laid eyes on this book.

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. The intensity of the little girl Marie-Noel's relationship with her father is clearly a reflection of that between the author, Daphne du Maurier, and her own father, the charismatic actor-manager Gerald du Maurier. 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.

Take a look around you, at all those vast legions of cynical, weary, burnt-out souls - lost in their private hells. And another biographer, Margaret Forster, reprints a letter, which Daphne du Maurier wrote in the same year of The Scapegoat's publication, 1957, just after her (Daphne's) husband Tommy had had a nervous breakdown.

At this point just less than half-way through, the dream-like quality is notched up a step, and we realise that John is beginning to perceive another, darker, personality hidden within his own self, much as the character "Doctor Jekyll" did, but more subtly. I adored the descriptive element of the novel, the characters are flawed and dislikable ( apart from one or two) which was an element I really enjoyed. Adrian Harrington began trading in 1971, as part of Harrington Brothers in the Chelsea Antiques Market on London's fashionable King's Road.

But isn’t he somehow responsible for these people now that he has allowed himself to be an accomplice to this deception?

On top of that, John finds that he is received into a family that is full of secrets and that maintains an uneasy and complex interrelationship between its members.It is in one of those cities, in a bar near the railway station, that he encounters a Frenchman named Jean who both looks and sounds exactly like him. As the two drink together, John confesses that he is depressed, feeling as though his outward life is a meaningless façade, and the pair move on to a hotel where John passes out. Probably some time around half way through the book I realised that I’d put aside all my concerns regarding the realism of the story in favour of just enjoying the tale.