Take Me Back to Manderley

THE SCAPEGOAT (348 pp.)--Daphne Du Maurier--Doubleday ($3.95).

At the end of The Scapegoat's first chapter, set in a French provincial bar, someone jars the hero's elbow and "as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well. I was looking at myself."

At that point it is plain that the famed author of Rebecca has not lost her tricky gift for making the reader hold his breath when literary esthetes tell him he should be holding his nose. To her romantic shopgirl's imagination. Novelist Du Maurier brings a proficiency for making imminent doom race impending revelation neck and neck, chapter by chapter. Loyal fans need only be told that they will be nervous wrecks by the end of The Scapegoat.

The look-alikes of Chapter 1 are the novel's narrator, a middle-aging English professor of French history named John (no last name), with a queasy bachelor taste of loneliness and failure in his mouth; and the Count Jean de Gue, scapegrace lord of a decaying chateau and a possessive family at St. Gilles in Normandy.

A whisk of the author's wand puts plain John ill at ease in the count's clothes and drawing room, half wanting and half dreading to be discovered as an impostor. The simplest acts are tense puzzlers, like finding his way to bed and then finding out who is in it. Acting the count, John soon realizes that the real count was fleeing a pack of emotional creditors whose hearts he had bankrupted. The count's mother is a morphine addict. His sister is a pious recluse who has not spoken to him for 15 years for unjustly killing her fiance as a collaborationist. His brother, who dutifully manages the family glass foundry, has been cuckolded by the count. His neglected adolescent daughter has a bad outbreak of mystical acne. And his wife, low hen in the family pecking order, is just a plaintive misfit.

To each the count's surrogate offers what love he can; from each he gleans a peculiar sense of life's purpose. When the real count gets wind of an inheritance windfall and returns to claim it, the stage is set for a showdown that is also something of a letdown. Author Du Maurier stuffs her novel with eccentric servants, eavesdroppers, potential murders, apparent suicides, strangely worded wills. For a romantic setting there is the 17th century chateau of St. Gilles, not unlike Daphne Du Maurier's own sprawling, 70-room Menabilly House on the Cornish coast, great and gloomy original for Rebecca's legendary Manderley. No reasonable Doppelgaenger could wish for an eerier home-away-from-home.

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