Gothic Tale

THE SCAPEGOAT (209 pp.) -- Jocelyn Brooke--Harper ($2.50).

When this spooky little novel appeared in England last year, it threw the critics into a tizzy. Elizabeth Bowen wrote: "This book, read in two hours, haunts me"--but she could not say why. Sean O'Faolain said: "It shakes the tapestry of life like a night-wind," but admitted he was "not quite sure what it is all about."

The bewilderment of such seasoned readers will be shared by many in the U.S., for The Scapegoat has as many pockets of darkness as passages of light.

Druids' Stones. Duncan Cameron's life has been a pastel daydream. His widowed mother has raised him in a pettishly feminine atmosphere; to the 13-year-old boy home is an "enchanted castle, like the Lady of Shalott's." When his mother dies and he rides off to his Uncle Gerald's shabby farm, the boy's heart twists in fear. He remembers Gerald as an ex-army man, redolent of polished leather, who fills him with indefinable alarm. Nevertheless, at first the orphan is surprised and delighted with his new home, relishes its bouncy, athletic regimen of icy morning baths and horseback rides. Gerald feels the boy a warm addition to his bachelor loneliness. But the novel's tone darkens, as if a psychic poison were seeping into both uncle and nephew.

When Duncan explores a field filled with eerie Druids' stones, Gerald accosts him in clouded anger, then mutters, "I suppose you had to come here sooner or later." The boy begins to sense that there are two Uncle Geralds: one normal and jovial, the other dark and menacing.

The night before Duncan leaves for school, Gerald treats him to a fireworks display. After the last flares are gone, Gerald grips the boy's arm and Duncan feels "the current of some deep emotion pass from the man's body to his own." Though unable to give this emotion a name, Duncan senses that he has somehow been soiled by evil. At school, where he feels "as though virtue had gone out of him," he becomes a sneak thief and is expelled.

Back home, the boy continues to steal, partly out of boredom and partly out of spite. When Gerald threatens to beat him, the boy imprisons himself in handcuffs and waits to be killed. To Gerald he cries: "Nobody's ever hated me before, like you do." Gerald protests his affection and the boy. as if suddenly peering into the sickest depths of the soul, replies: "It's the same thing."

Dawn-Chilled Face. In a climax reminiscent of the horror of D. H. Lawrence's The Prussian Officer, Gerald prepares to punish the boy for still another theft. His sadism unleashed, he pummels Duncan to death and then "gently [kisses] the pale, dawn-chilled face . . ."

This Gothic tale is artificially tensed by Author Brooke with misleading clues (the point of the confrontation at the Druids' stones is never made clear) and contrived devices of suspense. The Scapegoat still has the ugly reality of a fatal disease.

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