eating cucumbers without permission...

The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window, The Miserable Mill, The Austere Academy, The Ersatz Elevator, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, The Carnivorous Carnival, The Slippery Slope, The Grim Grotto, The Penultimate Peril, The End, by Lemony Snicket.

Presentation

The best thing about the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events is their existence as actual physical artifacts. If there were ever a compelling argument against e-paper, it’s these: beautiful, rough-cut hardcovers, tastefully illustrated by Brett Hellquist. They’re just wonderful, especially given the awful covers on so many children’s books; compare, for example, the grotesquely gaudiness of Artemis Fowl. The greatest tragedy of the film adaptation is that the charmless tie-in editions of the books replaced the originals on most store shelves.

It wouldn’t be outrageous to make a similar claim for the audio versions: Tim Curry (Rocky Horror etc.) reads, and he’s perfect.

There are two different editions of the first volume, one read entirely by Mr. Curry and one which he merely narrates, accompanied by sound effects and a full cast for the dialogue. I have only heard the original. Additionally — and unfortunately — he’s replaced on the third, fourth and fifth books by Daniel Handler, under his Lemony Snicket alias. He does a creditable job, but just can’t compare.

Content

The story proper begins at Briny Beach, where Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire have their holiday interrupted by news that their parents have perished in a terrible fire, which has also destroyed their house and all of their possessions. As if that wasn’t quite enough unpleasantness for a morning, the three newly-orphaned children are adopted by a distant relative, the villainous Count Olaf, whose only interest in them is their parents’ fortune, held in trust until Violet comes of age.

It’s charmingly dark. The Bad Beginning even opens with an admonition that the book not only has no happy ending, but also no happy beginning or middle; the reader would be better-off closing it and looking elsewhere for something more pleasant. It’s true: very little happens to the Baudelaires that isn’t bad, and what few happy times they do have usually consist of a brief respite between one horrible circumstance and the next. Nor is all cartoon-style peril, where the worst that can happen is a bump on the head from a falling anvil. It’s always the nicest ones who have to die…

No matter how dark it gets, the style is delightful. It’s self-conscious, with frequent authorial asides warning the reader to lay the books aside and take up something fun, like knitting, or bemoaning the way that Mr. Snicket himself was once shipwrecked, or poisoned, or trapped in a pit full of ravenous armadilloes. There are lots of nice little touches, like the explanatory parentheticals — here, the word “paranthetical” refers to a distracting mid-sentence interruption — which begin as vocabulary lessons for young readers but become saturated in irony as the series progresses.

The first seven books follow roughly the same formula: Violet, Klaus and Sunny are sent to live with a new guardian, only to be faced with another of Count Olaf’s schemes. It doesn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, so it comes as a relief when the sixth and seventh books gently transition into a new formula, based on the investigation of a mystery first uncovered at The Austere Academy. By the time the orphans visit The Hostile Hospital, they’ve taken control of their own lives and are actively attempting to unravel the Byzantine tangle of secrets they’ve become trapped within.

Events come to a head in the aptly-titled The Penultimate Peril, with virtually every character in the entire series — at least, those that are still alive — in residence at the Hotel Denouement, though prospective readers should bear in mind that the mystery is never really resolved. What makes The End, the final book, so charming and interesting, is that it makes the not-knowing palatable. The entire volume is, in effect, a continuation of the denouement that began at the (also aptly-titled) hotel, and its character is markedly different.

The End is the end of, essentially, a long coming-of-age story, charting the Baudelaires’ intellectual, emotional and moral maturation. They begin as children, thrown from the care of one adult to another, their only hope of escaping trouble to somehow alert an adult — notably Mr. Poe, their bank manager — of Olaf’s latest treachery. By The End, they’ve become fully indepdendent. (Most blatantly, Sunny grows from unintelligible baby to monosyllabic toddler to, finally, articulate gourmet chef.)

The moral character of the novels also changes. The Bad Beginning establishes a dichotomy between villains on the one hand, such as Count Olaf, and “noble people”, like Olaf’s kindly neighbour, on the other, but it is steadily eroded through the sequels. Most of the “noble people” suffer from a weakness of character that prevents them from helping the children: Josphine is a coward, Monty is too trusting, Jerome is too self-interested; others fall to peer pressure, blind faith in the rule of law, or undue deference to authority. The villains — even Olaf — are humanized, while the Baudelaires find themselves committing more than a few morally ambiguous acts.

It’s hard to complain that the story is never fully resolved when, in fact, that seems to be the point. Nothing is simple. Even villains have their good sides; even noble people can be villainous — and the difference between the two is only a matter of perspective. Every answer raises two new questions. Every person has two parents with stories of their own, four grandparents with stories of their own, ad infinitum.

They don’t live happily ever after, of course. If there’s a moral here, it’s that there is no end to the series of unfortunate events, just the books with that name. We call that series “life”. For some people it’s better, for some it’s worse, but what matters is how you live it. Try to do the right thing, find what happiness you can along the way, and ask yourself: “What’s the opposite of what Olaf would do?”