The Onion Girl, by Charles de Lint

Up to this point I've been pretty consistent about reviewing books I actually like here in this blog. My logic being, who would want to hear me rant for the space of three thousand words when they could be reading a mature and reasonable evaluation of a deserving piece of literature instead?

Then, in a fit of literary rage, I posted my review of burned. And saw my customary readership triple. While it's clear that I've been mistaken about my audience, I'm not yet sure whether I've underestimated: a) your desire to avoid bad books, or b) your appetite for mockery.

For my own peace of mind, I will assume it's some happy blend of the two.

*

The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint is, like burned and ttyl, one of those books I got gussied into buying because of the gimmick. (Inference: avoid buying books because of clever gimmicks. Also, with improperly capitalized titles.) The gimmick, in this case, was the beautiful cover illustration, which, combined with the title, suggested a careful and nuanced work of characterization. In case this makes me sound like a schmoe with no resistance to marketing, de Lint's writing in general (though not The Onion Girl in particular) had also been recommended to me by several people whose opinions I trusted—and so, swept away by some mad impulse, I added this book to my library.

I realized I'd made a mistake—from a financial point of view, at least—on the second page, after I read the following paragraph:

I'd always been aware of the otherworld, of spirits that exist in that twilight place that lies in the corner of our eyes, of faerie and stranger things still that we spy only when we're not really paying attention to them, whispers and flickering shadows, here one moment, gone the instant we turn our heads for a closer look (de Lint 14).

There is no precise grammatical term for a sentence like this, aside from "Argh, my eyes," or possibly "Help! Help! I'm drowning in commas." The length is unacceptable, for starters—unless you're Anais Nin, your sentences never need to run longer than three lines, at least not without the structural reinforcement of a semi-colon or two.

And then there's the content.

The fact that de Lint is comfortable referring to his fantasy realm as the "otherworld" in itself tells you practically everything you need to know about the quality of his writing in this novel—he works in cliches, but they aren't the cliches of an unoriginal mind. Rather, they read like the cliches of an immature writer with promise, like a teenager who hasn't yet learned that precision, more than flowery adverbs, is the mark of truly poetic writing. I'm fairly certain de Lint is anything but a teenager, but that's the impression I'm left with, and that's why I persisted in reading this novel to the end—he came so *close* to being good so many times that I held out hope he would eventually attain it.

(He didn't.)

There are three elements at odds with each other in de Lint's writing—his story, his prose, and his characterization. His story is fairly solid. The protagonist of The Onion Girl is Jilly Coppercorn, a painter, recovering in the hospital from a hit and run accident. She has a deep spiritual connection to faerie, the "otherworld," and as the emotional and physical effort of recovering from her injuries becomes more taxing, the farther into faerie she allows herself to slip. In the meantime, Jilly's friends are trying to figure out who ran her down in the first place, and a mysterious woman called Ray, inhabiting a darker (and, I daresay, more interesting) story of her own, moves nearer to the center of Jilly's tale, in a plot twist that is alone very nearly worth the price of admission. (If, you know, that price is a trip to the library.)

De Lint has one sterling quality which all too many authors, strong in prose and characterization, lack—he has a deft command of structure. The plot is well constructed, no holes or badly resolved plot threads, and the "what happens next" suspense is gripping enough to numb a determined reader to the fact that de Lint is one of those writers who can't trust the reader to make any intuitive leaps or logical connections of her own, but spells out every last detail, to the extreme detriment of the description and the dialogue. Most of the book is told from shifting first person points of view, but none of the characters talk like real people—rather, they talk the way a person who wishes to be perceived as mysterious and poetic might talk (but without putting this quality to work in the service of characterization—it is not only the characters, but de Lint himself, who is mistaken about the profundity of their dialogue.)

Which brings us to the greatest failure of this book.

Characterization is always the deal-breaker with me. Absurd plots and gauche metaphor, though distressing, will not rouse nearly as much of my ire as they deserve if my attention is distracted by a sufficiently riveting piece of characterization. And as I am a just beast, I only ask for a bare minimum of one brilliantly delineated character per book. For the sake one Gregory House, I will put up with any number inconsistent and muddled Camerons and Wilsons.

But de Lint, I am sorry to say, does not write characters so much as he makes vague gestures in the direction of characterization. The Onion Girl is populated with a background cast of indistinguishably fluttery women, who exist merely to cosset Jilly and reinforce her status as a fragile flower. The only exception to this is Ray, his ostensible villain, who exists to foil Jilly's delicacy. And as for Jilly herself—well, with a title like The Onion Girl, surely layers aren't too much to ask for? But de Lint's notion of "layering" is to contrast the older Jilly, a respectable member of the community, with the child Jilly, a victim of sexual abuse, while at the same time giving her an unnaturally clean bill of mental health. The only hint of real darkness in a background carefully constructed to flatter his heroine is the fact that, as a teenager, Jilly ran away from home and left her younger sister behind in an abusive environment—and even in this, Jilly is carefully removed from all blame, so that her guilt and self-recrimination become yet another platform for de Lint's inauthentic glorification of her.

It really is an unfortunate title. Possibly it should be The Rutabaga Girl.

The Onion Girl was published by Tor in 2001, which means that any day now the glue in the binding is going to give way and all the pages are going to fall out. Silly Tor.