Printed from WriteWords - http://www.writewords.org.uk/archive/2307.asp

Synopsis - The Rose Lane Musical Society

by  Jubbly

Posted: Thursday, November 6, 2003
Word Count: 348
Summary: A synopsis for the synopsis and outline group.





Synopsis: The Rose Lane Musical Society - A Novel of 90,000 words.

London based art teacher, Melanie is having a marital crisis. Her husband has left her for a younger woman with more potential and a pierced belly button. He has even taken their kids away on holiday with his new love. Infuriated - Melanie stays home nursing both broken arm and marriage. She's jump started out of her self-pity when she receives a letter containing a newspaper article sent from a relative back in her native Australia.

The press cuttings inform her that the body of a young woman has been unearthed in the garden of a Sydney home - the remains may have been buried for nearly thirty years. The names look familiar and Melanie realises the property that housed the grisly find was once owned by someone she knew as a child.
The flamboyant Brian Trinder, director of The Rose Lane Musical Society, an Am Dram Theatre company she belonged to back in the early, ugly seventies.

The summer stretches before her and her memories lead her back to the camp, glamorous, period of her life that was Seventies Sydney. She revisits the shy, gauche, ballet-dancing chorus girl she used to be and finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery and a journey of self-discovery. Who is the dead girl? What happened to the enigmatic Brian? Melanie uses the six week summer holidays to deaden her pain of the marriage breakdown - she meets a young girl, Elise, and finds herself becoming a mother figure to this unstable wild creature. She has a fling with a local performance artist and suspects her best friend of having an affair but fails to confront her. Can Melanie save her marriage and does she want to?
In short Melanie fills her life with as many situations as she can to avoid dealing with her present; she seeks solace in her past, when the identity of the murder victim is finally revealed and the truth not all it seems, she is forced to come to terms with her life.