Book Description

Mr Rolf is a disabled man who used to be a tyrannical college principal. Due to his recent disabilities has been forced to advertise for a personal assistant. An applicant arrives who seems to have all the necessary qualifications for the post and is taken on for a trial period. The story of the personal assistant is interspersed with flashbacks from another story, the story of Jerry Marshall, a left-wing English lecturer who used to work under Rolf. Marshall has apparently reached the lowly zenith of his career and is going through a mid-life crisis, trying to make a mark by writing novels in his spare time but none have yet been published. He is persuaded by a colleague to try for a position as Head of Department but things go terribly wrong for him when one of his own ex-students is awarded the post. In a fit of drunken despair and wanting to succeed at something in life, he persuades the college secretary to make a copy of one of his manuscripts on the college photocopier. Needless to say, she is caught by Rolf, who holds a kangaroo court and, without going into the whys and wherefores of the case, dismisses Marshall from his post. The dismissal is but one of a series of misadventures which are about to befall Marshall : fed up with his drinking and non-appearance, his wife then decides to ask him to leave and he begins a spiraling descent into the lowest echelons of society. Halfway through the film the personal assistant has taken Rolf for a walk in his wheelchair along a cliff path when the assistant’s mobile phone rings. He answers it and Rolf hears him use a different name – the name “Marshall” (the name of the man he fired) In the second half Rolf realises the danger he is in, as Marshall shows him the depths to which he sunk as a result, he believes, of his boss’s earlier decision to sack him, losing his wife, his family and finally becoming a mumbling, incoherent down-and-out Marshall has obviously come back for revenge but at the end the tables are turned when Rolf realizes that Marshall’s arrival is actually a blessing in disguise. He urges Marshall to do the deed, to release him from the shackles of his disability and send him tumbling over the cliff but Marshall then realizes that the worst revenge he can take on Rolf is to leave him in his disabled state to suffer in his final days.