User:Jennat/Dolphin Music
About the Author[edit]
Antoinette Moses teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of East Anglia [1]where she has an PhD in verbatim theatre. She has published several short works of fiction for Cambridge University Press, which have won three Extensive Reading Foundation awards. Her plays have received rehearsed readings and performances in Norwich, Cambridge London and Paris. A former journalist, editor, and film festival director, she wrote and presented two television series for Channel 4 on animation in 1983. Her latest award-winning short play, Break Out, was performed as part of the Pulse Festival in Ipswich in May 2007
Antoinette started working life as features editor of Television Mail (which subsequently became Broadcast). In 1973, she joined the publishers George Rainbird as an editor/picture researcher and initiated the Opies’ 'Classic Fairy Tales'. She then lived in Greece for a year, returning to work as a staff writer for Camera Press and then once again lived in Athens working with an English-language theatre company and writing a guide book, 'Athens Inside Out'. When she came back to England in 1978, she was asked to refound the Cambridge Animation Festival, which she directed it until 1984. As it was a biennial festival, during this period she also created film compilations for festivals for the British Council and the National Film Theatre and wrote for Variety, International Film Guide and Sight & Sound. She wrote and presented two series of animation compilations: Animated Fables and Click, click, click for Channel 4. In 1985 she helped set up the Hiroshima Animation Festival and also worked for the Directors Guild of Great Britain, editing their magazine 'Direct'. In 1988 she moved to Norwich, working for the Norfolk and Norwich as sponsorship and marketing manager. She left the festival in 1996 to write full-time. She is currently directing FLY, the University of East Anglia's Festival of Literature for Young People .
Plot Summary[edit]
Dolphin Music is a novel written for English language learners and published by Cambridge University Press, part of their Cambridge English Readers series, series editor Philip Prowse.
Dolphin Music is set in Europe in a totalitarian state, Control Europe Ltd, in 2051. Saul, the central character, is a music critic whose favourite music is that written by dolphins. He has a comfortable life and a cellist girlfriend in Switzerland, Caroline.
Over three-quarters of the population are over seventy, and Saul has to help old people as part of regular community work. But when Saul visits an elderly woman called Ruth Hunter, she reveals that she is a member a terrorist group and that dolphins are tortured to make music in a place called the Music Rooms. Saul initially rejects her information, but later mentions the Music Rooms to Caroline. This is picked up at BEATCON, by special officer, Dick Lane – by using the phrase Music Rooms, Saul has made himself a target. BEATCON is an anti-terrorist organisation, run by the fanatical Captain Marrs, with the tacit approval of the state’s Controller.
Saul returns to Ruth Hunter who tells him she wants him to rescue the dolphins and introduces him to her extremely efficient, computer-hacker granddaughter, Sue, who Saul immediately dislikes. But Saul’s protests are interrupted by the arrival of Captain Marrs who blows up Saul’s car thinking Saul is inside it. Saul, Ruth and Sue escape into underground tunnels.
The tunnels lead into a forest where the escaping party encounter wolves, which also attack Dick Lane and his group who have gone after Saul without permission. Dick is injured and two Specials killed.
Saul and Sue leave Ruth in a forest hideout and make their way to France with a group of tunnel workers and get to Switzerland where Saul tells Caroline what he has discovered. She doesn’t believe them and accuses them of being a couple of terrorists. Captain Marrs arrives in Switzerland and interrogates Caroline, finally telling her that Saul is dead. Saul and Sue, meanwhile, have fallen in love, rescued the dolphins and are taking them on a train to Italy. Captain Marrs follows them and, in the ensuing chases and fights, he is finally killed.
Caroline, thinking Saul is dead, reveals what is happening during her concert broadcast but, to win favour with Captain Marrs, Dick shoots her. Her death sets off a protest that removes the existing Controller.
Saul and Sue set the dolphins free, and as one wounded dolphin dies it creates beautiful music.
References[edit]
- www.uea.ac.uk/lit/people/academic/antoinette+moses
- Moses, Antoinette. Dolphin Music. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.