skygiants | (no subject)

Last month

genarti and I were helping a friend move and noticed a stack of B-tier extremely pulp-styled Daphne du Maurier novels waiting to go into her bookshelf, which is why both of us ended up leaving that house with a B-tier pulp-styled Daphne du Maurier novel in our purse.

genarti got Jamaica Inn, which she has not yet read, and I got The Scapegoat, which I have!

The protagonist of The Scapegoat is a sad and lonely professor who longs above all things to be French. He spends the first chapter wandering sadly around a French town thinking things like:

The smell of the soil, the gleam of the wet roads, the faded paint of shutters masking windows through which I should never look, the grey faces of houses whose doors I should never enter, were to me an everlasting reproach, a reminder of distance, of nationality. Others could force an entrance and break the barrier down; not I. I should never be a Frenchman, never be one of them.'

I'm not saying there are no situations in which I would be experiencing pathos here but I am afraid that for this poor professional English gentleman employed by the British museum, I simply experienced: comedy.

Anyway, UnFrench John is on his way to a weekend retreat at a monastery to contemplate the various failures of his life when he encounters that most wonderful of midcentury plot devices: A Completely Identical Stranger!

French Jean: My name is Jean and I am French! This is so wild! Tell me all about yourself!
UnFrench John: My name is John and I am not French! I am desperately lonely and have literally not a single person in my life who knows me well or cares about me.
French Jean: Dang, as someone who is having Big Family Problems let me tell you, UnFrench John, I would love to have not a single person in my life who knows me well or cares about me. That sounds like the ideal.

So French Jean takes UnFrench John out drinking, and then he takes UnFrench John back to his hotel room, and then gives him some more drinks, and long story short UnFrench John wakes up the next morning in French Jean's clothes with French Jean's chauffeur knocking on his door going 'did monsieur the count French Jean sleep well and is he ready to go back to his family estate?'

Because UnFrench John is the protagonist of a psychological thriller, he briefly considers the reasonable course of action (tell the truth, call the authorities, and find someone who remembers seeing Two Identical Guys at a restaurant yesterday) and then decides instead on a patently absurd course of action (go to French Jean's estate and pretend to be French Jean to French Jean's whole aristocratic family, for absolutely no reason except shits, giggles, and as aforementioned a deep-seated psychological longing to be part of a French family for some reason.)

Somehow this plan succeeds in spite of the fact that UnFrench John is simply incapable of rubbing two clues together. He is as genre-unsavvy as a babe in the woods. Despite the fact that French Jean dropped many a hint about Complicated Family Situations, UnFrench John is shocked, shocked! to discover that French Jean has a wife! and a daughter! and a mistress in town! and an unrelated active affair with his sister-in-law! which it takes UnFrench John almost a hundred pages to figure out, after she has met him in the hallway several times and said things like 'why did you not come to my CHAMBERS so we could be ALONE?'

UnFrench John is usually figuring things out about a hundred pages after I did, which is really my main frustration with the book.

French Jean's mother is like 'my son! have you brought me .... my special gift from Paris?' and then dives on the Special Gift and falls immediately into a deep slumber and a hundred pages later UnFrench John looks at the bottle and is like 'my God! I mean mon Dieu!! la morphine!!' UnFrench Jean looks at the terms of his will and learns that if his wife dies then he gets all her money and then a hundred pages later he's like 'my God! I mean mon Dieu!! I think perhaps French Jean and his mother would prefer if she died!!'

To be clear, I do not mind UnFrench John making absolutely wild choices to maintain his deception for, again, no reason except his own psychological problems and also the psychological problems of the people around him. This is what I expect and want from a Daphne du Maurier novel. I am just offended by the fact that he is somehow managing to pull this off despite the fact that he's going about in a cloud of Math Lady Face. Sir if you are going to be undertaking a lengthy impersonation you have got to be more on the ball than this! Form a hypothesis for once in your life!

So, as far as books about Completely Identical Strangers go, this is no Brat Farrar or Ivy Tree. However! I have to admit: the ending of The Scapegoat kind of turned it around for me. I think the ending is brilliant and also extremely, extremely funny.

So, I spent most of this book convinced that the entire impersonation was part of an elaborate plot by French Jean to murder his wife for her money, either while UnFrench John had an alibi or by getting UnFrench John to take the blame. I was not correct! The wife does die, but it's an accident.

Once UnFrench John has the money, he embarks on a plan of sorting out everybody's lives. French Jean was a dick, but UnFrench John is a nice man who in the seven days he has been pretending to be French Jean for elaborate psychological reasons has really come to care about this family! He's going to get Mom off la morphine! He's sending his brother and sister-in-law away on a fancy business trip to sort out their marriage! He has apologized on French Jean's behalf to French Jean's sister for the fact that French Jean killed his sister's fiancee as a collaborator during the war! He is going to parent French Jean's daughter and they are all going to live happily ever after!

Then he gets a call from French Jean.

French Jean: Hey! I heard my wife died and I am a millionaire now so all my family stress is over. I am coming home, let's swapsies back.
UnFrench John: oh my god. oh my god. well I can't let French Jean come back and be an asshole to his family again so clearly my only choice is to murder him!

So here is UnFrench John waiting at the meeting point! with a gun! the door opens!

...it's the nice old local priest who says, 'oh non, are you thinking of doing away with yourself because you are so sad about your wife? We cannot be having with that, please give the gun to your old friend the cure and we will just take it and dispose of it, there's a good boy.'

UnFrench John cannot think of a single way to say no to a nice old local priest, so obviously he does this, and the local priest wanders off and there! lurking behind him! is FRENCH JEAN! ALSO WITH A GUN!

French Jean: wow that was so funny. Cannot believe you got so easily got by the old 'send the nice old priest' trick. Okay buddy tell me all about what you did during the seven days you were pretending to be me.
UnFrench John: I FIXED YOUR WHOLE FAMILY, YOU MONSTER --
French Jean: oh wow ... this is really cute .... every element doomed to failure of course because you have known these people all of seven days. You really thought you could fix morphine addiction by sitting up with my mom One Night? adorable. anyway want to hear what I did with your life?
UnFrench John, math lady intensifying: MY life???? I assumed you'd just fucked off to Europe!
French Jean: nah, I tried your life! It was very relaxing for five days. Then it got very boring. So I quit your job, cancelled your lease, and sold all your furniture.
UnFrench John: .... and now .... I suppose you shall kill me ....
French Jean: you are so cute. Why would I do that. You're completely useless. Anyway, I'm going back to my life now! Have a nice rest of yours!
UnFrench John: ???
French Jean: oh, I'm sorry, that was rude. Here's the two hundred pounds I got, for your furniture.
UnFrench John: ?!?!?!?!?!

a.) thematically I genuinely appreciate the way that this ending destabilizes everything we think we've learned about this family because as much as French Jean is an asshole you truly cannot learn everything about people in Seven Days b.) I'M CRYING WITH LAUGHTER. HE SOLD ALL HIS FURNITURE.

Note that there have been two movies made of this book. Both of them end with UnFrench John triumphantly killing French Jean and taking his place, because nobody agrees with me that this ending is perfect. But I'm right.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I started imagining this as the setup of every "Reincarnated as a villain(ess) and fixing everything" story and am delighted. The villain(ess) can so easily come back!

Delightful.

S:LKDJFDKL YOU'RE SO RIGHT. I want an anime isekai version of this pronto

du Maurier: You can't learn everything about people in a week
Skygiants: so true
movie people: I honestly don't know what you mean here
Skygiants: Like...people are more complicated than their first impression
du Maurier: definitely in my experience
movie people: they what now

'we got Alec Guinness here which means he has to WIN --'

'well, he will'

'no, I mean, the GOOD Alec Guinness has to win!'

This sounds HILARIOUS actually? Probably not meant to be hilarious but nonetheless!

I was mentally adding sitcom music to the soundtrack of half the scenes. Daphne wanted me to take this seriously as a crisis of selfhood and I was just like 'well, this is slapstick, though...'

as always your review is a delightful read. I am just completely stuck on: how good is UnFrench John's grasp of spoken French that he can pass himself off as a native speaker among native speakers?

lol that was my first thought as well! If you speak French well enough to fake being French Jean, why so woeful to start?

As Becca told me of more and more gonzo plot points, I kept saying, "Does he know he can emigrate to France? Does he know he doesn't have to work for the British Museum?"

It is unclear to me if he does in fact know this.

So much this, OMG, I mean, mon dieu! XD

All of this sounds wild, and thanks for the amazing laugh I got out of it. I might kind of want to read this, but I feel reasonably sure your summary would remain 100x more satisfying than the book.

He is a professor of French! We know this because he tells French Jean this and French Jean is like 'why would anyone who isn't French want to study France. What is going on with you. Don't you have your own history.'

Daphne du Maurier is hilarious and people just aren't ready to accept that. And they're wrong.

Daphne du Maurier should absolutely be writing sitcoms

oh my god this book sounds bad but daphne. amazing. what if Rebecca came back.

OH MY GOD this was AFTER Rebecca that's SO funny

Someone MUST do this setup with Rebecca somehow

We actually discussed this while Becca was reading the book and looked it up because we were curious. And while not every piece that an author creates must be a banger, one does wonder where this book came from. Did she need money? Was she parodying something? Did she just want to write about a man who couldn't pick up a clue if it was handed to him?

Mysteries.

the world may never know!!

how MANY times can you give a lonely shadow person imposter syndrome in a big fancy house. well, as many as you want, it turns out,

YOU KNOW WHAT. SHE'S RIGHT

This is so very France-as-Elfland (of Annwn)!

asjd;fkldj incredible way to put it thank you

I mean, but was French-Jean's-ex-brother-in-law a collaborator?

The entire retelling of this ending is a comedy routine. He's standing behind the priest! With a gun!

It's pleasantly ambiguous! UnFrench John has decided that he was not and it was an unprovoked murder based on the fact that he looked at some photos and the brother-in-law had a trustworthy face. French Jean's reaction to that, as to so many things, is 'lol.'

YAKETY SAX INTENSIFIES

"and a hundred pages later UnFrench John looks at the bottle and is like 'my God! I mean mon Dieu!! la morphine!!'"

I am CRYING here

it's not even disguised at all! it says MORPHINE in large clearly readable letters!!!

Yet again I leave your blog knowing that I don't need to read this book but SO GLAD that I got to read the review! The great service you do us by reading books we don't need to read and then writing hilarious reviews of them! I thank you!

This is definitely one of the sorts of books that I read while writing the post I'm going to do about it in the back of my head.

I read this book for the first time aged 12 when we went on a school trip to Cornwall and had to do A Project and I chose Daphne du Maurier because I liked books without realising that I did not have the maturity or life experience to understand any of them. I was very confused and I'd really like to see what 12 year-old me said about it but I don't know what happened to the Project.

I re-read it last year and I had forgotten nearly all of it. I love him wandering about ineptly pretending to be French and being bemused about all these love affairs he seems to be having. An Englishman from the British Museum cannot possibly be expected to expect such things! I especially love him sorting everyone's lives out like a more incompetent Flora Poste. And like everyone, I want to know how he faked native speaker French!

LIKE A MORE INCOMPETENT FLORA POSTE omg you're exactly right. god bless!!