‘So much to tell you’ by John Marsden

Fourteen-year-old Marina recently transferred from a mental hospital to Warrington boarding school, she doesn’t speak. Her muteness stems from a very traumatic incident one year prior. Driven mad by his wife’s intention to leave him, Marina’s father, in a moment of rage, threw photographic acid in their car window and, instead of hitting his wife, hit his daughter's face (McIntyre, C 1999).

Severely scarred, both inside and outside, Marina has become disconnected from a mother by whom she feels betrayed and abandoned. She is withdrawn not only from her parents and the “friends she once had” (Marsden 1987 P.56) but also from her own emotions. She records the struggles of her daily life tentatively in a journal assigned, but not read by, a favourite English teacher.

Marina’s introverted ways and “anorexia of speech” has meant that above all she is lonely. Marina’s tendencies to reject and withdraw form relationships have left her a prisoner unto herself. “I draw lots of stripes, which weren’t stripes at all, but were bars, prison bars’ (Marsden 1987 p.80). As the novel progresses so too does Marina ability to reach out to those around her, she becomes a participant in her own life as opposed to a bystander. 

Marina’s school life can be considered a microcosm, a world unto itself (Martin 2011 P.19) from which she initially is an islet. In her first weeks of boarding schools Marina nurses a general bitterness towards her environment and those within it; she rejects the overtures of her dorm-mates and is unable to express her needs, opinion and emotions. Though the development of relationships Marina is able to find her voice and eventually accepts affection, friendship and her own growing interest in school and social life. This process of healing is aided by her developing ability to ‘lean’ on others.  When the young daughter of her favourite English teacher, shows the kind of affection Marina is unable to she is unable to retreat within herself any longer and hence forced to face the traumas of her past.

“She was looking up at me- I guess she was sleepy- then, after a minute, she put her hands up to my face and touched my cheek with her finger and said: “Hurt face, hurt face.” I know I went very red and hung my head, but something in the way she said it seemed to break something inside of me and I realised I was going to cry, and there was no power on earth that could stop it, and even though I fought and fought to hold it back the tears ran down my face and, even worse some sobbing noises came out – the strange sound of my own voice, that I had not heard for over a year” (Marsden 1987 P.57).

Marina is challenged by the relationships she forms. No longer able to render herself invisible, “shrink away” or make herself “small” (Marsden 1987 P.58), she is reminded that people can be happy and kind and caring.                                                                                                                                        “Sometimes it feels like I go for weeks on end being totally ignored by everyone, and then Cathy comes along and does something nice like that and I feel like I’m in a shattered shocked heap of tiny pieces on the floor, trying to put myself and everything back to together in the new pattern – everything having to be reconstructed in a slightly different way” (Marsden 1987 P.62).                                                                                     

 Marsden poetically refers to these acts of kindness as proverb in Marina’s English class. ‘The darker the night, the brighter burns the candle’. Marina has not experienced kindness in a long time, and hence the more moved she can be by it. Her newly founded relationships with dorm-mates acts to shine light unto Marina’s ‘dark night’, her all engulfing depression.