Saving Francesca

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like Saving Francesca more than I did. After all, it’s about a topic close to my heart: depression. In particular, it’s about the effects on a family when a parent is incapacitated by depression.

It’s not really fair for me to measure this depiction in view of my own experience of a parent with depression. Every family will experience it differently; indeed, every person within a family will experience it differently. So, while Francesca’s experience didn’t always ring true for me, I could appreciate what an important topic it is for writers of YA Literature to address. After reading so many YA books wherein parents die, the far more common reality of clinical depression is due more attention.

The strength of this novel is the characterisation of Francesca’s friend and family groups. As with Looking for Alibrandi, I found myself enjoying the lead character’s interactions with her school friends more than with the love interest. I guess Prince Charming is doomed to be a boring character type. Marchetta also writes developed teachers and school administrators; for the most part, they genuinely care about and respect the young people in their care. (Of course, there’s always one bad apple who really shouldn’t be teaching.)

Overall, I found myself laughing out loud at the antics of Francesca’s friends and extended family, and being moved to tears by her love for her brother. But I screamed internally at some of Francesca’s overwrought monologues and raised my eyebrow sceptically at a group of Year 11’s knowledgeable discussions of multiple Shakespeare plays.

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Does My Head Look Big in This?

Does My Head Look Big In This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My first thought about Does My Head Look Big In This? was, “It’s Looking for Alabrandi for a new generation.” That impression may have more to do with the narrator of the audiobook version I listened to using the same wide-eyed tone that characterised the reader of the audiobook version of Alibrandi. Still, the similarities don’t end there. Both books have young, female protagonists who, simply because of their cultural and religious backgrounds, have no option but to think about their place in the world. Unlike the predominantly Anglo-Australians each girl goes to school with, they’re required to move between two worlds as often as they go to school and return home each day.

In this book, the central character, Amal, makes the decision to become a full-time wearer of the hijab. Her parents are concerned about the response she will attract from her school and friends, while her school and friends demand to be reassured her parents haven’t forced her to wear the hijab against her will. Inevitably, perhaps, Amal becomes representative of Islam and every act done in its name; consequently, she is required by non-Muslims to explain the atrocity of events like the Bali bombings and, to the well-intentioned, be a spokesperson and educator on her religion.

First published in 2005, I think this might be an early attempt in young adult literature to help young people explore issues of religious identity in a post-September 11 world. In Australia, the Bali bombings, which are featured in the novel, would have added a particular urgency to the need for this kind of discussion. Certainly, there’s a sense that Abdel-Fattah wrote a list of the most common expressions of ignorance and bigotry towards Muslim-Australians and incorporated them into the experiences of Amal, her friends and family. It feels quite jam-packed and sometimes didactic. That said, Does My Head Look Big In This? has made me curious about other books from the perspectives of other western Muslims.

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Looking for Alibrandi

Looking for Alibrandi by Melina Marchetta

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5 stars

I think if I’d read this book twenty-three years ago I’d have appreciated it more. It’s a coming of age story from what seems to be a more innocent time: pre-September 11, pre-social media; from an era when a family gathering to make a year’s worth of passata was cause for embarrassment rather than a mark of culinary cosmopolitanism and a sure-fire ticket to the MasterChef grand final.

I suppose it’s a good thing that third-generation Italian-Australian Josephine Alibrandi’s narration of the trials of her final year in high school now seems dated; being of southern European descent, a ‘wog’, no longer attracts unfavourable commentary from the casually racist in this country. Not that there’s much evidence, more broadly, that Australian society has become less racist in the intervening years–attention has merely shifted to more recent migrants who have arrived in Australia after fleeing war and persecution in their homelands.

For better or worse, the storyline around the mental well-being of one of Josephine’s friends has stood the test of time. I look forward to the day when John Barton’s fate is rendered unbelievable.

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Laurinda by Alice Pung

Laurinda by Alice Pung
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a novel about the intersection of class and race in Australia, a country that prides itself on the notion of ‘the fair go’. It begins compliantly enough: the protagonist, Lucy Lam, is successful in her application for the inaugural access and equity scholarship at Laurinda, an exclusive private girls’ school.

Narrated in the epistolary style, Lucy shares her triumphs and doubts, as she, the child of Vietnamese refugees who work in a carpet factory and sew for pittance from home, enters into the elite Catholic society of Laurinda.

Lucy quickly learns that her schooling to date does not meet the Laurinda curriculum standard as she is required to take remedial English via a series of individual tutoring sessions. While she easily understands the explicit educational expectations of her new school, she struggles considerably with the implicit curriculum: the social and cultural values and prejudices that underpin every interaction she has with her peers, teachers, and the school’s administration.

Pung interrogates the rhetoric of access and equity that pervades educational discourse and, indeed, Australian society, revealing it to be less about affecting social change than maintaining the status quo. Laurinda is a tale of noblesse oblige , Australian style.

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Twelve Angry Men

Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the things I’m finding quite frustrating, looking through the texts that are studied in Australian high schools, is that so many of them are American–classic American, yes, and there are easy connections to be made with issues that affect Australia, given, like the US, it’s a former British colony and now an advanced capitalist, post-industrial society, but still, not Australian; and so it seems to me that injustice is always elsewhere and we don’t really have the courage to guide young people through the inequities in our own society–past and present–for fear of upsetting parents and politicians.

The recent withdrawal of Indigenous and multicultural issues from some parts of the Australian curriculum in favour of the ethnic majority’s ‘Christian heritage’ is an explicit version of the retreat that’s evident in this long-time focus on American and British texts. When I was in school, for example, I studied The Crucible by Arthur Miller; To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee; a range of Black American and British WWI poets; and Shakespeare’s King Lear. We did look at Camus’s The Stranger for a North African-French twist. I loved all of these works. And I had the very best English teacher, who was the first person I knew who called herself a feminist. I still remember some of the conversations we had about the issues that each of these poems, plays, and novels raised. I think I’m basically an existentialist because of The Stranger; it probably helped that there was a soundtrack in the form of a Cure song at the time, too. But, for someone who grew up mostly in far north Queensland, I didn’t learn anything about the Indigenous history of this country. I could rail against the injustices meted out to African Americans, but couldn’t even see those on my very doorstep.

Part of this ongoing focus may well be that there’s a lot of supporting material for these classic American and British texts; it’s quite time consuming to create whole units from scratch, and then there’s the suspicion that the Australian text won’t stand the test of time–it’s issues won’t be universal as those in the established texts apparently are. It makes me wonder about Americans studying American texts. Are the issues too confronting for their students? Or do these texts raise issues that are considered part of a distant past, despite all evidence to the contrary?

***

Twelve Angry Men was first written for television and it bears the hallmarks of early television plays: a single setting; it’s character and dialogue driven; and at seventy or so pages, succinct in its exploration of social issues in just over an hour, perhaps up to an hour and a half to allow for advertisements in the American broadcast system. These features also make it an ideal text for students in their middle high school years to examine.

Despite my reservations about its study over other texts in the Australian context, Twelve Angry Men is the very best example of what was possible in the early years of television, even if the film version is more well known now. The characters are so tightly drawn; every utterance conveys nuances of their distinct dispositions, while managing to embody a range of social groups that made up the US in the 1950s–at least as represented by white men. This latter point is one that needs to be discussed, but the play does examine this privilege afforded the jurors, if in a broader discussion about the death penalty and the ideals of the American judicial system.

Even as I write this, as much as I find to admire about the play–the arc of Juror No. 5 is just perfect–I can’t get away from my initial reservations about its use in the Australian context, and there are more concerns that have arisen during this reflection on it. I hope these implicit dynamics of the play are brought up in discussions in Australian classrooms.

(As an aside, I noted that the LA Theatre Works adaptation I listened to, before I read the play, reveals the final verdict of the jury by allowing Juror No.3 some redemption that isn’t available to him in Rose’s script. On the one hand, this can be accounted for in the shift from the affordances of the close-up in television–in a direction to see it written–to the aural emphasis of live performance–Juror No.3 blurts it out as he finally recognises his own motivations; on the other hand, this alteration clearly arises out changing ideas about the motivations of the kind of behaviour exhibited by men like Juror No. 3)

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