THE BEST DAYS, THE WORST DAYS
Michael McGirr
Melina Marchetta’s first novel, Looking for Alibrandi, was one of the highest-selling novels by a first author of all time and had huge success as a film. Ten years later, she has released her next book (click here to go to review of Saving Francesca; click here to go to a previous interview with Melina Marchetta).
There’s plenty of room for fantasy in the reading lives of young people. Writers such as Tolkien and J. K. Rowling fill the imagination and dramatise moral dilemmas on a grand scale.
At a time when that genre has become so popular, it is easy to overlook the importance of books which deal with the immediate reality of the lives of young readers. Imagination has a role to play in everyday life as well. It can help find a path through the labyrinth that most people actually live in. Not all moral choices decide the future of the entire human race. That does not mean they are not important.
Melina Marchetta’s new book, Saving Francesca, is set in a world which she knows well. As in Looking for Alibrandi, the book which made her name, she explores the lives of young people in their final years of Catholic schooling.
In this case, Marchetta readily admits that the school in question, called St Sebastian’s, is based on St Mary’s Cathedral College in the centre of Sydney. Marchetta has been teaching there for the last seven years.
Of course, the story is fiction. It imagines, for example, that the school has begun enrolling girls whereas, in fact, St Mary’s only accepts boys. But Marchetta presents situations which she knows from the inside. Her work speaks to the experience of many readers, especially young readers.
Francesca Spinelli is a new student at the school. There are a small number of religious brothers on the staff. One of them, Brother Louis, is the only teacher for whom the troubled Francesca will do homework. She is impressed by both his kindness and his knowledge of literature: ‘I couldn’t bear it if he was disappointed in me’. The image of this hardworking man is sharply at odds with that of many brothers presented in the news. This minor character developed because Marchetta is more willing to trust her own experience than media images.
‘Before I became a year level coordinator, my desk in the staffroom was next to the desk of one of the brothers called Brother Hyde. He is a Christian brother. I described him exactly the way he is, with his knowledge and his kindness.
‘There is often a gap between personal experience and public image. Take Arabic kids, for example. There are some horrible stereotypes in the press. The reality of them for me is the kids in my class. Up close and personal, they are as naughty as the next kid and as gorgeous as the next kid. The thing about teaching is that you don’t have images in your room. You have people. You have to deal with their reality.’
After the phenomenal success of both the book and the movie versions of Looking for Alibrandi (see Australian Catholics, Winter 2000), Marchetta is clear that the classroom is a place she has chosen to remain.
Looking for Alibrandi is one of the texts set in Sam Thomas’s Year
9 English class. He reviewed her latest novel, Saving Francesca , for
this issue. He discussed his ideas in Reader’s Feast bookstore with
Melina Marchetta—who also teaches Looking for Alibrandi at her school!
Photo: Bill Thomas
‘It still gives me life and energy. I wouldn’t be there if it didn’t. I think it would be soul-crushing to be in a job if you didn’t feel a passion for it, especially teaching. It’s not such an easy job. You are a thousand things in those kids lives. I don’t find it any easier than I did seven years ago. But I do feel totally at home at school. I feel sometimes it’s like walking into my family home. I feel this confidence there.’
St Mary’s Cathedral College is dwarfed by St Mary’s Cathedral. It has a famous neighbour in Archbishop Pell. Marchetta says that some of their students went to the last World Youth Day where they had a chance to meet Archbishop Pell and were enormously impressed by him.
Yet she believes that those who teach religion day after day in the classroom have a much greater impact in students’ lives. She counts herself lucky to be working in a school which has ‘its own soul’ and where she is comfortable with the ideology of teaching which is entrenched in the place.
‘There isn’t such an "us and them" mentality. When you don’t have to take an aggressive stance towards the kids, it puts it back on them to work out what is appropriate behaviour. Inflicting certain rules is about discipline and not about self-discipline. I’d rather they learnt self-discipline. That means allowing certain freedom about choices. So I don’t put up too many boundaries. As an English teacher, you hate to put up fences around them. I think that works in the classroom because the school itself sets clear boundaries.’
The main character in Saving Francesca is experiencing a kind of crisis of identity. Her mother, Mia, a forceful personality who lectures in communications UTS (University of Technology, Sydney), is going through a period of debilitating depression. A week after the book had been published, Marchetta had been surprised by the extent to which readers were responding to this element of her work.
‘I wanted so much not to research it because I didn’t want to turn it into a text book. But I knew a lot of people who had suffered aspects of depression where the hard question becomes "What will get me through one day?"’
Mia’s illness puts enormous pressure on the family. Whereas Looking for Alibrandi dealt with a fractured family coming together, this book deals with a close family which is in danger of fracturing.
‘I come from a family where my parents are still together. Outsiders might see us as a compact little family. But we could have gone different ways a lot of times because there are strong, passionate feelings everywhere with us. But we just have this ability to hold on to each other. That is what I wanted to explore. I wanted to show what happens when a family goes through some really hard stuff but they have an underlying sense that "I’m just not going to let go of this".’
Marchetta has no doubt that the students she teaches have a spirituality. ‘They probably don’t want to admit it.’ With teenage boys, she sees that spirituality expressed most obviously in a strong sense of what is right and wrong.
In the case of the fictional Francesca, a loss of self-confidence has
a marked effect on the way she relates to God. As Francesca’s world
starts to crumble, so does her self-esteem. Marchetta writes:
God doesn’t talk to me. It’s because every night I lie here
with music in my ears and I say my prayers and fall asleep in the middle
of them. He only talks to people like Mia. People he thinks are worth
it. Because they have passion. They have something. I have nothing …
I’m a waste of space.
Francesca thinks God is punishing her for not being somebody else.
‘It gets to the point that she hates herself so much that she thinks
God doesn’t even see her. It’s a bit like that John Donne poem
where the poet thinks he is so unworthy that he wants God just to batter
him into shape. Francesca thinks that she is unworthy and guilty.’
Eventually, her situation changes. Marchetta says, however, that one of the difficult lessons she has learnt through being a teacher is that there’s a lot of problems you can’t fix.
‘I remember in my first year of teaching I’d have tears in my eyes when the kids told me certain stories. Then they told me it freaks them out to see tears in my eyes. They were right. It’s not my job to get emotional. You have to hold back on how you are feeling. You have to help them make the best decision themselves.’
At the end of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Professor Dumbledore says ‘it is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, more than our abilities.’ There is a simple reality in that sentiment of which Melina Marchetta would warmly approve.
The characters are so real …
Our
first set text in Year 9 this year was Looking For Alibrandi. It was not
the kind of book that I would normally read but I really enjoyed it. So
when I heard that Melina Marchetta had written a new book called Saving
Francesca, I was looking forward to reading it.
The book tells the story of Francesca Spinelli. There are many things happening in her life. She has moved schools and is one of the few girls in a previously all boys school. Francesca is forced to mix with people she has never known, and this is hard. On top of this, her mother suffers from depression and life at home is hard too. Then she falls in love and this is complicated as well. Francesca is trying to find her place in life.
The great thing about Saving Francesca is that the characters are so real you can believe in them. They are the kind of people that you could meet anywhere and they are so likeable too. Her school, although different from my school, still has recognisable aspects that I think would fit all schools, especially the range of personalities that you find.
The book gives you many important issues to think about, for example, the importance of friends and family and the need to appreciate them and to talk about problems with them and the important difference an individual can make to the lives of those around them.
I think this book will be enjoyed by lots of readers of all ages!
Sam Thomas
Year 9, Xavier College
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