Although I’ve known about Daphne du Maurier all my life, until I found two of her novels in a secondhand bookshop in Hawes, North Yorkshire, a few weeks back I had not read anything by her.
The two novels I found in Hawes were My Cousin Rachel, which was the first one I tried. In it, I admired above all the opening page, plus: 1. du Maurier’s descriptions of Cornish landscape; and 2. the ingenious way in which the first and last lines of the book are absolutely exactly the same - that is one of the cleverest tricks I've ever seen in a novel.
All the same, for my taste the plot was too melodramatic and things became a bit repetitive - did she/didn't she, was she/wasn't she? Page followed page and this dilemma kept being reiterated. In the end I got fed up. The drive to know what was going to happen won out over my enjoyment of the journey, and I flicked on through the pages to the end of the book and the plot resolution that I found there. I have to admit that I am a very impatient reader and in the end, despite du Maurier's best efforts, I got rather bored. Mea culpa.
The Scapegoat suited me much better. For a start the situation was a much more interesting one - rather than a reworking of the myth of the woman devil/angel, this book concerns the story of two men of identical appearance who meet by chance and swap lives with each other. To make this appear not only believable but entirely feasible is no easy task but du Maurier manages it brilliantly. She also displays much greater inventiveness than she does in My Cousin Rachel, as in The Scapegoat she creates not only a whole array of vivid characters but an entire world, in a setting that was not, as My Cousin Rachel's setting was, intimately familiar to her. The plot also is a great deal more complex than that of My Cousin Rachel. It contains not just one but a number of different threads that each need resolution. I was gripped by the story for almost all of the novel, and I came away with huge admiration for du Maurier's imaginative powers and storytelling gift - both traits that I think may be underestimated at the moment and possibly a bit out of fashion in the world of literary fiction.
Of course, some might say that du Maurier's work is not literary fiction, but she writes so well, with such a grasp of language and such excellent descriptive ability that I don't think it would be fair to class her with writers of hackneyed potboilers just because she sets out to be entertaining. I think she deserves enormous respect for the rare skill she has for conjuring whole imaginary casts of people and grounding them in believable, vividly portrayed places that she has entirely made up.
When I said that the two lookalikes swap lives with each other, I should have explained that, in fact, one is forced into this by the other, who leaves him no choice. Having got extremely drunk with his French doppelganger, Jean, English John wakes up in the morning to find the Frenchman has scarpered, taking all his belongings. People appear in the hotel room where he has been sleeping and they all expect John to be their Jean. Before he knows it John has been forced into the position of taking over the other man's life.
This other man turns out to be a count, head of what is, at the time John comes into the role, a dysfunctional family. Over the course of the following days, plodding English John uses his native commonsense and decency to set all to rights and by the end of the novel, thanks to him, everyone in the chateau is on the path to peace and happiness. What happens next I cannot tell without giving the plot away.
I suppose if one wanted to see it, there might be a Brexit parallel to be found in all this, or at least a comforting impression that solid old England, represented by John, could sort out Johnny foreigner’s mess. While the political situation right now appears to be pretty much a mirror image of this situation, England in a shambles and Johnny foreigner triumphant, the salient point (she said desperately) is the mirror element. Mirror images are at the heart of the book and things are not always what they seem on the surface. As the introduction to my edition points out, in her examination of what happens when two beings who are outwardly identical swap places, “what du Maurier does so brilliantly is to shows us that identity (mistaken or not) is largely based on what others want or expect of us, what they project on us”. If only the EU understood that they should have wanted dear old Blighty to run the show, everything would have been all right.
Shut up, Zoe, no one wants to think about Brexit - and, indeed, it was to escape the whole subject that you picked up these novels in the first place.
I should add that, despite my initial assertion that this book is very different from My Cousin Rachel, like that book it is concerned with the possibility of duality in a central character. That is to say, just as the reader is never certain whether Rachel is a much maligned person or unspeakably wicked, so in John and Jean, we can, if we wish see a devil and a saint. However, du Maurier's tale in the end suggests that each individual contains both possibilities and even when someone's motives are devilish - as Jean's may be, in tricking John into taking over his life - the results can be entirely for the good - in this case, the effect is that John learns how to love. When he realises that this has happened, John asks another character,"What do I do with love?" The answer he receives is, for my money, the best line in the book: "You give it away."
I think it is all too easy to dismiss du Maurier because she produced plot-driven novels and did not give a great deal of attention, so far as I can see, to style (I'm not suggesting her writing is bad, just that, for her, style is not the central thing). On the evidence of these books, it seems to me that she was a born storyteller with a rare gift for creating in the reader’s mind vivid imaginary worlds, crowded with apparently real people. That is a great deal harder than it looks and for du Maurier I have nothing but respect and admiration.
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