The Scapegoat - Daphne du Maurier

I stumbled upon a movie version of The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier a few years ago and was fascinated by the story. So, of course, I got a copy of the book, which I hadn't read when I watched the movie, and it sat on my shelf until the GoodReads True Book Talk group read it in March.

Once again, Dame Daphne didn't let me down. The Scapegoat was a classic DMM thriller. Basic story is that a boring British academician (John) whose specialty is French history meets his doppelganger, a roguish French count (Jean), in a bar and Jean tricks John into changing places with him. Very much a Prince and the Pauper story that Mark Twain played around with, and Dickens had a go at in A Tale of Two Cities.

In The Scapegoat, Jean has made an utter mess of his life, his family business is going under, his daughter is flighty and quasi-suicidal, his sister is a religious fanatic who hasn't spoken to him for 20 years, his mother is a morphine addict, his brother hates him...you get the picture. He tricks John into being his scapegoat - assuming his identity so he can disappear without causing a manhunt. John also feels he has made a mess of his life and is headed to a monastery to try to find a reason for living.

Matthew Rhys played John and Johnny in the British movie based on the novel.

Incredibly, John is able to step into Jean's shoes--they are identical, and John's French is perfect. It was fun to read about how he managed to figure out all the various threads of Jean's life, and wonderful to see how he was able to mend the family and the business. John is definitely the hero of the story.

The book and the movie differed most in the ending, although the movie is set in England not France, and Jean became Johnny. The book turned out to be very positive and life-affirming. The movie version took a much darker tack. I ended up rewatching the movie after finishing the book and really wonder why the film makers choose to go dark instead of light with their version.

The Scapegoat was first published in 1957, making it one of DMM's later works. It was tightly written, really interesting, especially since WWII and the French occupation and resistance is still very fresh in people's lives, and well worth reading.

This novel is part of my Classics Club first 50--I'm closing in on getting this challenge done this year!

Top Ten Tuesday - Books on my Spring TBR list

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

The topic for today is books on my Spring TBR list.

Assuming I finish War and Peace this month, and it's highly likely as I am beyond the point of no return (aka past the half way mark), here's what I am looking forward to reading:

The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier - the GoodReads group True Book Talk is reading this in April, and I am thrilled. I watched the movie a few years ago and loved it, and got a copy of the book and it has sat on my shelf since then. The movie is set in England, while the novel is set in France, but I think the plot is pretty much the same.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver - I'm a Kingsolver fan and have heard good things about this novel.

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon - another bookclub book, this time with the JASNA Denver/Boulder reading group.

Before I Grow Too Old: A walk from John O'Groats to Land's End by Pat Jilks - my daughter read this, enjoyed it, and lent it to me as she knows how much I want to do this walk and how much I love reading about walking journeys.

Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder by Kenn Kaufman - my husband just read this, and recommended it. We are celebrating our 35th anniversary in May with a trip to a birding festival, and this will be perfect prep for the vacation. Incidentally, we had planned to go to Lake McConnaughy in Nebraska to see the sandhill crane migration, but cancelled because of the Bombogenesis storm that knocked the socks off of Colorado and is causing massive flooding the Midwest. 

Song of the Lark by Willa Cather - speaking of Nebraska and eastern Colorado, I am eager to read this classic and hope to get to it this spring.

The House on the Strand

I've been meaning to reread Daphne Du Maurier's The House on the Strand for decades now, and so decided to make it my first book in the R.I.P. challenge this year.

I read it when I was in my teens, in the mid-70's, shortly after it was published in 1969, after reading Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel and being eager for more of DMM. 

It wasn't the first time-travel book I had read, but it helped cement my love of the genre. In the intervening decades, I forgot most of how it works, with a couple of notable exceptions. I remembered that the first-person narrator, Dick Young, took drugs to voyage back to the 14th century, that it took place in Cornwall, and that Dick was invisible to the 14th people he encountered, but his body never actually left the 20th century. Oh yes, and encountering trains while tripping can be dangerous.

This time around, I found it utterly fascinating and my admiration for DMM's skills as storyteller of psychological thrillers knows no bounds. The way time travel works in The House on the Strand is that the drug transports the individual back to the physical location in which they are occupying, but centuries earlier, and then the person returns after the drug's effects fade or they touch a person of the distant past.

This time reading the book I found two aspects intriguing. First, the role of Magnus, Dick's friend from youth, who is a scientist and develops the drug and talks Dick into being his guinea pig. Magnus is definitely a Mephistopheles character who tempts Dick and enables his addiction to visiting the past, not only by providing the drug but also by supporting Dick's growing fascination with the world of the past by digging up the historical records on the various people he encounters, from his alter-ego in the other world, Roger, to the damsel in distress, Isolda, who he comes to love more than his 20th century wife. Magnus/Dick also sort of reminded me of Gatsby/Nick from The Great Gatsby. Dick, like Nick, is enthralled by the aura of the flashier, more confident, bigger than life Magnus/Gatsby, and becomes a pawn in a game he in no way understands.

Second, DMM leaves ambiguous whether Dick actually was able to travel back in time, at least in his head. The doctor who treats him near the end of the novel makes a convincing case that the drug is hallucinogenic and the trips are entirely figments of Dick's mind, with all the Freudian nooks and crannies creating the House on the Strand that Dick loves so much. However, Dick himself believes that time and space are not a continuum, and the drug enables him to inhabit both, one with his body and one with his mind. Because there is no way that Dick could've know the histories of the real people he encounters, DMM leaves that possibility open.

The ending reminded me of the ending of DMM's classic short story, Don't Look Now. The ending really leaves you breathless.

This was a perfect start to R.I.P. for me--chilling, spooky, ghostly, mysterious--everything I like in an October book.

A Flurry of Wonderful Books

Life has been busy these days and I haven't done a good job of blogging about books finished, so here's a catchup post.

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald - when I first heard about this non-fiction memoir, I thought I wanted to read it, but then I read mixed reviews, but ended up loving the audio version, as read by the author.  For me, it was a perfect mix of bird info (and I love hawks in particular, though not the fanatic that Helen is), personal memoir (Helen trains a goshawk as a means of dealing with her grief over her father's sudden death), and literary bio (Helen discusses the life and hawking experiences of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King as a context for understanding and explaining her relationship to Mabel, the goshawk she acquires and trains).  I thought the premise and structure and writing were all excellent.  I listened to this book while driving 200 miles a day for a week to be with my 93-year old mother while she was hospitalized for some serious complications to the whole aging process and I found that this book helped calm me down, took me out of my own worry, and helped me focus on making good decisions during that very hard week.

My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier - I read this with the GoodReads Tuesday Book Talk group and though it was reread, I had read it so long ago that I couldn't remember most of the details beyond the broad outline of the story.  DMM is not only a master of the psychological thriller, she is also a master of reader manipulation.  I find it interesting that both of DMM's masterpieces, this novel and Rebecca, are essentially designed to make the reader forgive a murderer for his deed.  There's a new movie version that is about to be released and I'm on the fence about whether I want to see it.  It is an oppressive, frustrating story, and I'm not sure I'm in the mood for that right now.

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead - an excellent novel, innovative, compelling, and well-written.  That said, I'm still struggling with how I feel about the construct of the Underground Railroad itself.  In this novel, the Underground Railroad is an actual railroad--with tracks in tunnels, physical stations, and physical locomotives and cars.  In a way, pushing the story into a fantasyland instead of keeping it in a historical context almost seemed to eclipse the accomplishments of the people who implemented the historical Underground Railroad.  I need to think about this book some more, but reading it was an incredible experience.

After Flodden, by Rosemary Goring - part of my Reading Northumberland reading project, this time I read about the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden in 1513 in which the English annihilated the Scots. I found it very readable with a wonderful cast of characters (it is a novel) who illuminated this period of English/Scottish border history for me.  I've got the sequel to this book, Dacre's War, on order and hope to read it later this month.

Castle, by David Macaulay - a children's book but one that explains the basic structure and function of the the various parts of a typical medieval castle.  I loved the illustrations and the clear, interesting text about the building of a castle and its walled town in Wales.

Happy May and happy reading!

Top Ten Tuesday: Gateway Books/Authors

This week's Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) is about those Gateway Books or Authors in Our Reading Journey who got you into reading, or into reading a genre you never thought you'd read, or brought you BACK into reading.

Definitely this was a fun Top Ten list to consider--I focused on authors because when I find an author who works for, I tend to try to read everything they come out with.  I also had a blast coming up with the right illustrations for my authors.

Donna Leon - Leon's series of books featuring Guido Brunetti sparked an interest in Venice that has taken hold of me and just won't let go.  Now I seek out books--histories, novels, memoirs--about Venice.  Hoping to make it there this fall.

Nevada Barr - I've always liked mysteries, but Barr's Anna Pigeon series which features a lot of National Parks and a lot of hiking got me interested in both.  Now I walk daily and hike weekly, and make a point of planning vacations around visiting National Parks...truly one of America's best ideas! 

Mary Stewart - I'm not much of a Romance reader but my mom used to get British women's magazines from our town's newspaper/tobacco shop in the 1960's and I learned to read by reading the serialized Mary Stewart stories, complete with stirring illustrations!

Bill Bryson - My love of travel and travel memoirs can be traced to reading Bryson's oh-so-snarky travel books.

Jane Austen - Classics don't have to be big, scary, or filled with political ramblings that are incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Daphne du Maurier - I love psychological thrillers and DDM is the mistress of the genre.

James Michener - I love historical fiction and Michener hooked me early.

Margaret Forster - I didn't really start reading literary bios until my dad gave me Forster's bio of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and I fell in love with the genre.

Erik Larson - I love his histories that read like novels; Larsen's books made me go back and read In Cold Blood, the prototype of the genre in which Larsen shines.

Tracy Chevalier - Artifact-based fictionalized backstory. Love it!

Frenchman's Creek

I count Daphne du Maurier as one of my favorite authors.  She is a master of the psychological thriller and a wonderfully inventive storyteller.  So, you can imagine my delight when the Classics Club spin 2 rolled lucky #6, which meant I got to read Frenchman's Creek as my next classic.

It pains and astounds me to report that I was disappointed in the book.  It started off wonderfully, with a vintage DDM description of the harbor, river, and creek in Cornwall that is the setting of the book.  She transports the reader from the present to the 17th century, evoking the mists of time and the timeless beauty and magic of a beloved place.

The problem is that the premise is shallow, the plot unrealistic, and the characters are wooden.  I can imagine DDM conceived of the premise while walking down a narrow path from her home, Menabilly, to a creek and thought about how pirates might've hidden in the rivulet and raided the neighboring hamlets with impunity.  It's a great idea, but it doesn't have legs.

The French pirates are uniformly jolly, good-natured, loyal, and loving; the English gentry they rob, with the exception of Lady Dona, the protagonist, are uniformly oafish, thick in body and mind, and sour.  Lady Dona is beautiful, of course, spirited, of course--bored with her life, her marriage, her money and seeks adventure in the arms of the pirate captain, the noblest man to ever breathe.  He is expert at everything--fighting, making love, fishing, cooking, leading raids, sketching seabirds, sketching Lady Dona, etc.

Lady Dona actually fakes an illness and leaves her 18-month old son and 3-year daughter, both of whom she professes to love to distraction, in the care of a nurse while she goes on a raid with her pirate buddies.  Puh-leaze!

While I was reading Frenchman's Creek, I couldn't help remembering the bio I read a few years ago of DDM.  She wasn't the most caring of mothers, often neglecting her own children and marriage when she was in the throes of writing, which was most of the time.  I couldn't help but feel that Frenchman's Creek was little more than the author's own fantasy of leaving her children and husband and escaping into a Disneyesque AdventureLand. 

The book lacked the psychological insights and tightly wound, but real emotions that characterize her other stories and that has drawn me to them over time.  I'm not ready to give up on DDM--there are still books of hers I've yet to read and many I plan to reread, but Frenchman's Creek won't number among the latter.

I did have fun looking at the various movie posters, though.  There are some pretty cheesy book covers too!

And, Frenchman's Creek is officially my 7th novel in the Historical Fiction Challenge...well, on my way to the Renaissance category, which has a lower threshold of 10.

The Breakthrough

While I was reading Daphne du Maurier's short story, The Breakthrough, which is the second in the collection entitled Don't Look Now and Other Stories, I found myself wondering whether du Maurier had read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and if so, whether she was consciously writing a response to it.

While The Breakthrough is not about reanimating a body but about capturing, literally, life's energy at the moment of death so that energy can be reused in the world and not "wasted" in heaven. In both stories, the premise is that life is a combination of body and spirit (or energy or soul) and that the spirit can be isolated from the body and manipulated. In both stories, the scientist who is playing God and manipulating that energy achieves what he attempts and then recoils in horror from what he has wrought.

The Breakthrough, published in 1966, is a first-person story about an electrical engineer who goes on a short assignment to a rogue project lead by a charismatic "mad" scientist, Mac, who is perfecting a computer aptly named Charon (i.e., the mythological ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the River Styx that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead). The protagonist, Stephen/Steve, helps with the electronics that produce the voice that can hypnotise people and animals in order for them to release their energy to the computer system at the moment of death.

The Breakthrough is a wonderfully spooky sci-fi thriller that is the perfect blend of realism, the supernatural, and philosophy. One of my personal maxims is that technology will force humanity to deal with and tame our self-destructive tendencies and it was a pleasure to see that idea played out so well in this story. In other words, this story shows that just because we can do something doesn't mean we should it.

The Breakthrough was written almost half a century ago; Frankenstein was written almost two hundred years ago. In Shelley's story, Frankenstein creates a monster when he plays God; in du Maurier's story, Mac learns compassion when he does. He finds his own soul in allowing that of another to pass to the afterlife. Like most of du Maurier's stories, her title is double-edged. The breakthrough that Steve and Mac achieve is two fold--they find out how to capture a person's soul, and they find out how to put that knowledge back on the shelf and that is the real breakthrough and one that still makes me hopeful for the future.

Don't Look Now

I followed up The Turn of the Screw with Daphne du Maurier's classic short story, Don't Look Now. Unlike Turn of the Screw, which left me irritated and puzzled, Don't Look Now delivered a satisfying thriller that kept me on the edge even though I had read the story years ago and sort of remembered how it worked.

I always thought the title was simply derived from the game that John and Laura play in the opening scene. It is, of course, but it also is a clue to how this story, and perhaps all good thrillers, work. I'm not a magician, but my understanding of the magician's art is to distract the audience so they don't pick up on how the trick works. For the split second in which the audience is looking at the distraction, the "magic" happens.

So too with this short story. Du Maurier puts forth a series of distractions to keep us from anticipating where the danger will come from. First she makes us think that Laura is the one in danger because of her grief, then the little girl that John and Laura see after dinner in Venice, then their son Johnnie, then Laura again when John sees her on the vaporetto with the twins. It's only on the last page of the book that we realize that John is the one in danger. Granted, the psychic twin did tell Laura that John was in danger if they stayed in Venice, but since John doesn't believe her, we don't either.

Mysteries, and especially psychological ones, depend on the reader not looking at the right things at the right time. The best stories are those in which all the clues are there in plain sight, but you doesn't see them because you are looking at something else. You are being purposely distracted. Just like seeing a good magic show can leave you exhilarated and impressed, a good mystery should do the same.

Don't Look Now was a joy to read. Du Maurier is truly the grande dame of the psychological thriller.

Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller

Often, the subtitle of a book almost seems like an afterthought, a way of cataloging the book but not really significant.

In Daphne Du Maurier, by Margaret Forster, the subtitle is everything. This bio definitely focuses on the bisexual aspect of du Maurier that Forster uncovered during her research and the full scope of which, according to the Afterword, her children didn't know.

While I was reading this bio, I kept wondering whether Daphne would have been the success she was had even one of the conflicting elements that went into her story been different. She was the golden girl of a notorious family--her grandfather was a renowned Victorian illustrator and novelist and her father a successful and flamboyant actor--and living up to her family name clearly was extremely important to her. From her earliest memories, she portrays herself as sexually confused--seeing herself as a boy, wishing she was a boy, and feeling that she had to put her boy in a box. She found artistic as well as psychological and sexual relief in her writing to the point where she came to see the writer within her as a separate self, a "demanding other self" that was "placated only by writing," which drew her away from attending to her other demanding roles of wife and mother.

Thinking about Daphne's story, and having read Justine Picardie's novel Daphne: A Novel recently, I can't help but think about my adolescent logic (derived mostly from healthy doses of the Brontes, Fitgzerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Daphne herself) that went something like this:
1) All writers are tortured souls who must be miserable in order to write.
2) I don't want to be miserable.
3) I cannot be a writer.

I'm not a teenager anymore and writing has brought me great joy, but like I said, I can't help wondering whether she could have written Rebecca or My Cousin Rachel or The Scapegoat or The House on the Strand if she hadn't felt miserable, trapped, scared, driven, insecure, or, at times, a bit psychotic.

This was a fascinating bio, well-written, well-footnoted, and best of all, Forster is a pro at clearly marking where she is speculating. She also does a superb job at reading between the lines of Daphne's letters and highlighting inconsistencies, which usually are quite telling. She provided a nice mix of analysis of the stories and novels, interesting anecdotes about their publication, and, like Daphne herself, provided a wonderful sense of place as she followed Daphne from London to Cornwall to Egypt to Italy, etc.

Peter Pan and Daphne and Rebecca and Wuthering Heights

I swear, Justine Picardie, couldn't have woven a better tapestry of interrelated threads together than the lovely work she uncovered and presented in Daphne. In rereading that sentence, it sounds like a dig, but it isn't. The Brontes and du Mauriers and Lost Boys of Neverland are so intertwined that their story is really, as Picardie presents it, one long story.

Now that I've finished the novel and read her acknowledgements and afterword, I can fully appreciate the work she did as a literary slueth. I especially liked how she wove elements of her own story into that of Daphne with the contemporary heroine, who does, finally, get a name.

When I read books that I love, the stories and the authors that produce them become part of my bones, and their stories become part of my story as well. Part of who I am comes from the books I read and reread, especially during those teenage years. Picardie taps into this feeling so beautifully with Daphne so that interconnected aspect of literature becomes integral to the story and theme as well.

In my last two posts, I neglected to mention the Peter Pan aspect of the Daphne story but the last part of Daphne really brings this facet to the foreground. Daphne du Maurier's cousins were the original Lost Boys that J.M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan for and about, and it is a thing of beauty to watch Picardie work with Branwell Bronte and Peter Pan while not losing track of Rebecca and Rachel and Heathcliff and Cathy. There's a wonderful sense of place throughout the whole--from Hamstead Heath to Haworth to Menabilly and Cornwall and back to London.

I wonder whether I should watch Finding Neverland at last, and what about Daphne? I'll definitely be reading The Brontes, by Juliet Barker and Daphne du Maurier, by Margaret Forster.

Finally, here is Justine Picardie's blog, which is loaded with interesting articles, photos, etc. about Daphne du Maurier.

Here's my first post about Daphne, and here's the second.

Daphne

One thing I've noticed that's a bit different about my blog than other book-oriented bloggers is that most others tell you about books after they've read them, but I tend to want to blog most at the beginning or mid-way through.

Today's post is no different.

Last night I started Daphne, by Justine Picardie. I'm only about a third of the way into it and it's fantastic.

Daphne, at this point anyway, is a modern Rebecca story in which the timid, self-conscious heroine, when she's not obsessing about her much older husband's first wife, explores Daphne du Maurier's own obsession with Branwell Bronte and whether he actually penned or at least had more influence on Wuthering Heights and/or Jane Eyre than scholars give him credit for. Picardie, in alternating chapters, lets the unnamed heroine, Daphne du Maurier, and a Bronte scholar named Symington tell their stories while they explore Branwell's life. Symington's and du Maurier's stories are set in 1957, and the unnamed heroine's is contemporary, which adds a delicious layer of complexity to the whole novel.

I love literary mysteries, and this particular topic is near to my heart. Like the unnamed heroine, I loved du Maurier as a teenager and read most of her books and stories. I love the Brontes, and am fascinated by Branwell after reading du Maurier's bio of him, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, which was recently reissued with Picardie providing the introduction. And I'm interested in du Maurier herself, not just her life and work as a popular writer, but her family. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, did illustrations for some of Elizabeth Gaskell's works--I'm still trying to find a good source of them--and I've wanted to read his immensely popular novel, Trilby, for years now.

In addition to the planets aligning for me with regards to subject matter, Picardie is an excellent writer. The change in pov between characters is perfect--each has his/her own voice--and their stories are well-balanced with enough interconnecting threads for there to be a fully integrated whole.

Finally, the dust jacket art is superb. I love the photo of Menabilly (Daphne's home and model for Manderley of Rebecca), and of course, the bottom photo shows a woman holding a red umbrella, which is the recurring scary image in du Maurier's story, "Don't Look Now." Very nicely done!

Can't wait to get back to this excellent book.