Unit six
By Arthur Hailey
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Teaching Objectives
a) b) c) To help students to appreciate the novel. To help students to analyze the plot, theme, and characterization To help students to enlarge vocabulary, esp., to get familiarized with colloquial English, slang and ungrammatical English.
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• The story of Hotel:
• The setting: the St. Gregory Hotel, the largest in New Orleans, Louisiana. From Monday to Friday, the Hotel is experiencing a crisis of being forced to be sold to a chain hotel owner. • The events: in the crisis, there are four knotty problems that face the Hotel managers: dealing with an attempted rape in a room; catching a thief operating in the hotel; several hundred of dentists threatening to leave the hotel in protest against the hotel‟ objection to serving a black dentist, and finally the case of the Duke of Croydon. • The end: The novel ends with a pleasant surprise. A sick, old, eccentric man staying in the hotel turns out to be an extremely wealthy man from Montreal, Canada. Earlier, he fell seriously ill and was saved by Peter and his girlfriend. To show his gratitude and to repay their kindness, he buys the hotel from its former owner and makes Peter the new executive vice-president, with complete authority to run the hotel as he thinks fit.
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Story summary
• At first the Duchess tries to deny everything, but doesn’t succeed in convincing the police. The Duke then decides to go over to police headquarters before they come for him, wishing to save the little shreds of decency left in him. He takes an elevator to go down. This elevator which has been out of order for some time and badly in need of repair breaks down. As it goes down, one set of clamps(夹钳) holds and the other fails. The elevator car twists, buckles （变形）and splits open, throwing the Duke nine floors down to the cement（水泥） ground. He dies instantly.
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Story summary
• The Duke is an internationally famous statesman and the newly-appointed British ambassador to Washington. He and his wife occupy the best suite in St. Gergory. On Monday evening while driving back with his wife from a gambling house, the Duke and the Duchess, however, drive away. The hit-and-run becomes top sensational news in New Orleans. The hotel’s chief house detective Ogilvie notices the battered car when it comes back. Instead of reporting this to the police, he goes to see the Duke and the Duchess.
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Story summary
• So she offers to pay Ogilvie more than he has asked on condition that he drives the car to Chicago up in the north. The greedy detective agrees. At one o’clock Thursday morning Ogilvie gets the car out of the garage. He is seen leaving by one person only, by Peter McDermott, the assistant general manager. Though it strikes him as odd, Peter does not link this up with the hit-and-run until late that afternoon when he witnesses the funeral of the two victims of the accident.
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Story summary
• However, the novel ends with a pleasant surprise. A sick, old eccentric man staying in the hotel turns out to be an extremely wealthy man from Montreal, Canada. Earlier, he fell seriously ill and was saved by Peter and his girl friend. To show his gratitude and repay their kindness, he buys the hotel from its former owner and makes Peter the new executive vice-president, with complete authority to run the hotel as he thinks fit.
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Story summary
He promises to keep quiet about what he knows and asks for a large sum of money in return for the favour. The Duke, now totally at a loss as to how to act, hides behind the skirt of her wife. The Duchess understands that to get themselves out of this mess, the car has to be driven out of the south where people are alerted about the hit-and-run.
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Arthur Hailey (1920-2004)
----- born in England; ---- began his writing career while an RAF（British Royal Air Force ） pilot during the Second World War; ----- became a Canadian citizen as well as British; -----Hailey's novels have been published in thirty-nine languages. -----An estimated 160 million copies are in print worldwide. ---- Most of his books have been made into films or TV series.
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Story summary
• Peter McDermott, the assistant general manager, has to tackle several other knotty problems: handling an attempted rape which has occurred in one of the hotel’s rooms; catching a professional thief operating in the hotel; Then there is the Duke of Croydon.