Reading Journal – The Onion Girl

The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint

WARNING: SPOILERS

Charles De Lint's novel, The Onion Girl, is ostensibly about Jilly Coppercorn facing her past and starting to heal from injuries to her body and spirit. Jilly is hit by a car, leaving her paralyzed. During the long period of recuperation in the hospital, she gains access to the Dreamlands and searches for healing there. Meanwhile, her sister Raylene, damaged spiritually by abuse and poor choice of friends, finds her way into the Dreamlands. She and others run as wolves and hunt power animals, spilling their blood. Various characters from the Newford series are hunting Raylene and helping Jilly. Jilly sacrifices her health to restore Raylene, deciding to heal herself, while Raylene finds a path to redemption.

Newford, as imagined by De Lint, is a place where Celt and Native American mythical beings wear combat boots and thrift store jeans while they rearrange the universe. Magical creatures are in the parks, on the streets, anywhere in your peripheral vision. The characters featured in De Lint's Newford stories touch magic and are transformed by the experience. Jilly is an artist. Her paintings depict goblins in the sewers, elves hiding among the street people, and other examples of magic that goes unnoticed.

Jilly's role in the previous Newford stories is as a sounding board for those encountering myth and magic. They know they can talk to her about what they have seen because she has painted something similar and is comfortable with the fantastic. Usually the person starts out as one of Jilly's casual acquaintances and think of her as a well-meaning flake, only to change their opinions and consider her an island of sanity in the chaos they've discovered. Myth is messy, with rules that don't make sense to modern minds. No matter what, Jilly remains cheerful and positive in the face of the unknowable, which proves comforting.

Jilly has an interesting set of contradictions. She paints the world as she believes it to be, but has only seen the fantastic as a vague blur in her peripheral vision. She herself does not have a direct transforming encounter until the events in The Onion Girl. Another contradiction is more common. Jilly is a good listener who shares little about her own past, a supportive friend who fears intimacy and a straightforward problem-solver who avoids confronting her own pain. Thus, Jilly is not changed by the fantastic because she is a Teflon girl and nothing sticks to her.

Jilly's friends are a formidable network of folk with access to world-class transformative power. The Onion Girl is more their story than hers. Her changes are seeds at best. The character who changes is Raylene. Raylene is the one on a quest, although she thinks she is running away. Jilly specifically seeks a quest, but she is really running away.

In interviews De Lint admits to a fondness for Jilly that makes him reluctant to cause her pain or resolve her issues completely. So, he gave her the feature role of a minor character. Minor characters can have goals and need changes but achieve neither. Jilly is still injured and in need of healing at the end of The Onion Girl, although she does resolve to change. If any spiritual advance had been made, Jilly would have been healed by her mythic friends. If she had changed, Jilly would have reached out to Geordie and their mutual unspoken love, but she stays with her safe choice, the one who can't hurt her emotionally because she doesn't need him.

How did the author get away with this? De Lint uses Jilly's story as an umbrella arc, uniting all plots. Jilly's and Raylene's stories together take up less than half of the page count, but are almost seamlessly interwoven to make one sister's story shadow the other. The supporting characters are helping Jilly, hunting Raylene, or both. These supporting characters were once featured in other stories, so De Lint uses thumbnail sketches to establish them in The Onion Girl.

All of this interests me because I am writing an ensemble story with a protagonist who is only capable of limited change, but her actions and the motives behind them drive the story from beginning to end. I can adopt his technique to make my two main viewpoint characters have parallel quests and be shadows of one another. Every character in my ensemble story is affected by the actions of my main protagonist, so an umbrella approach makes sense.

Overall, The Onion Girl was disappointing to me as a Jilly Coppercorn fan who wanted to see her resolve her issues, mildly entertaining as a reader of the Newford stories who loves the quest motif, and invaluable to me as a writer who wants to offer a compelling tale.