A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 7-9

I think I've already covered the bases with my criticisms of A Series of Unfortunate Events so far, and so I won't repeat myself here other than to say that in this current trio of books, I'm still having trouble buying into a world filled entirely with evil or uncaring adults. I understand that young readers might be able to accept this vision of the universe (as I apparently did when I was younger), but as an adult* now, I find it a little pandering to a young audience and a little lazy on Handler's part in terms of how he keeps the Baudelaires in danger. (I could go into a longer discussion on that second point, but I'm hitting my tolerance threshold for extended discussions of Lemony Snicket.) That carry-over criticism from last time out of the way, on a more positive note, these three books are not nearly as repetitive as the past six were. In fact, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, and The Carnivorous Carnival represent a change of course for the series. Not so much so that the books are unrecognizable, of course: the Baudelaires still outsmart their way out of harm; Count Olaf adopts new, horrible disguises; Snicket begs the reader to stop reading; etc.

But this time around, as if taking a cue from the parody in my previous post, the Baudelaires finally buck up some nerve (I could point out that they're more or less forced to after they're declared murderers but let's just go ahead and give them credit), ditch Mr. Poe, and set out on their own at the end of The Vile Village, thus ending the "Baudelaires-are-stuck-with-a-new-horrible-guardian-until-Olaf-shows-up" structure that has dominated the first half of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Charging unhappily forward, the series shifts its focus (or maybe reveals, depending on how deeply Handler thought the books out when he began them) to a web of mysteries. The books are no longer just about the Baudelaires' surviving Olaf, they're about the secret history that binds together the Baudelaire parents, Count Olaf, the Baudelaires' guardians, and even Lemony Snicket himself. How well Handler pulls this secrets shtick off in the long run remains to be seen (I have vague but unpleasant memories on this front), but in these books at least, it's a smart new direction that helps liven the series up.

That's it! Nice and short, this recap was. Next time: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 10-12! I'm almost done! Yay!

*Shut up.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 4-6

                                         
So... this project might have been a bad idea! Or at least choosing to reread A Series of Unfortunate Events might have been a bad idea! At any rate, it's six books in, and I'm getting pretty sick of this series already. Granted, I don't think these books were designed to have been consumed all in one go, but their constant repetitiveness certainly isn't helping either. The series was already starting to grate on me by the time I was skimming my way through the end of The Wide Window last week, but it's getting even worse now because I'm beginning to find the characters annoying too.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Baudelaire children are very mild-mannered. They are polite and demure, poised and virtuous; so much so that sometimes the books read a little like the child-saint hagiographies I had to read in elementary school. The Baudelaire saintliness is admirable in the way it provides young readers with good literary role models, but I am not a younger reader and these kids' passivity is starting to p. me o. (plus it's not like extreme passivity is that great in a role model either). As brash and dunderheaded as Harry Potter is, I'm starting to yearn for some of his devil-may-care attitude in these orphans because at least the boy wizard gets stuff done. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaires mostly wait around for miserable things to happen and then deal with the misery as it befalls them. Their default emotional state is a kind of glum resignation, when by all rights, it should be an almost insane rage. Time after time, the Baudelaires are ignored or cut off by some adult, and they sort of shake their heads sadly and decide it's no use to try arguing further. It's becoming unbearable for me that, even if it wouldn't do them any good, these kids don't scream and cry and plead with every fiber of their beings for someone to listen to them.

I understand that these books take place in a heightened reality in which the characters' emotions are intentionally one-note and somewhat preposterous, but that also doesn't mean that this heightened reality can't also be deeply annoying, especially over the course of thirteen books. By the time Count Olaf shows up in his sixth disguise with his sixth plot which Mr. Poe ignores for the sixth time, it's hard not to feel that perhaps by this point, the Baudelaires should quit moping and start preparing for this sort of thing in advance.

(Taking one look at their miserable new home overseen by their latest incompetent caretaker, Violet turned to her siblings and said, "Right. Enough of this. Klaus, what do you know about firearms?"

Klaus had read many books about firearms in the family library before it had burned down. "From the books I've read," he said, "I think I could explain how to construct a weapon from the items lying about this dilapidated house."

"Aboutime!" Sunny shrieked, which meant something like, "And I could put my tiny, sharp teeth to good use biting these bits of metal on the floor into bullets!"

Tying her hair up with a ribbon, Violet said, "Klaus and Sunny, with your respective researching and biting abilities, I think I could invent something to help us stop Count Olaf."

An hour later there was a knock at the door. Before the Baudelaires could even look up from their project, the door swung open to reveal a surprise most loathsome--a word here meaning "not very surprising at all because it was the horrible Count Olaf."

Wrapped from head to toe in bandages, Olaf appeared to be disguised as some sort of patient afflicted with a terrible skin disease. But even through the bandages, Olaf's nasty smile and gleaming eyes could be--

Violet shot Olaf in the face with a handgun.

"Violet!" Mr. Poe cried, approaching from the kitchen doorway. "You've just killed that poor, skin-diseased man!"

Not even bothering to respond, Klaus pulled Olaf's pant leg up to reveal the incriminating eye tattoo on Olaf's ankle. Violet dropped the homemade gun into Mr. Poe's arms with one hand and dropped the microphone she'd also invented onto the ground with the other hand. And walking side by side, the Baudelaires left behind the miserable house and their miserable lives as Sunny called back "FUUUU!" which meant something unfit to be printed here. The End.)

Parodies aside, I also feel that story-wise, things are similarly getting a little too unrealistic in this second installment of books, even within the heightened reality the Series has established. Gone more or less entirely are those dark moments of realistic violence that gave the series a sense of genuine danger. It's all derring-do and standard adventure-story peril now, or at least it is in Books 4-6. Perhaps because of the difficulty of significantly incorporating an infant into an adventure story, Sunny's storylines in particular tend to push things into a Roald Dahl level of fantasy that doesn't quite feel in keeping with the tone that's been established. In the climax of The Miserable Mill, for instance, Sunny uses her sharp teeth to engage in an actual sword fight with an adult woman. Not only did this stick out for me as unusually and disconcertingly fantastical for the Series, I also just found it difficult to imagine logistically (plus it hurt my teeth to think about, which, admittedly, might have been the intent).

On the bright (gloomy?) side, there are some signs in these books that Handler's getting a little restless too and that he's begun exploring ways to shake things up a bit. In The Miserable Mill, in which the Baudelaire children are shipped off to a lumber mill and forced to overcome Olaf's plot to hypnotize Klaus, Violet must research books in order to save her siblings while Klaus must learn to do some impromptu inventing. It's not a huge shake-up, but at least it indicates a willingness to change. In The Austere Academy, Handler reveals the first signs of a larger storyline at work in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Sent to live in a boarding school, the Baudelaires meet the Quagmire Triplets, also orphans and also future inheritors of a large fortune. Before the book's end, though, Olaf has kidnapped the Quagmires, but not before one of them yells out the notorious acronym "V.F.D." In The Ersatz Elevator, another major character comes into play for the first time in Esmé Squalor, a fashion obsessive and all-around miserable human being. Not much more is revealed in terms of what the grand plot of the series is, but this book at least makes clear that there is indeed a grand plot: the infamous V.F.D. is brought up again (although its meaning still remains unclear), and the Baudelaires discover a secret tunnel running under the city, one that leads up into where the Baudelaire home once stood.

These aren't game-changing developments, and they don't do much to diminish my existent complaints about the Series. But from these various changes and hints at a larger mystery, there's hope at least--and I do seem to recall this being at least partly true--that in the next installment of books, Handler breaks even more from established formula and tries even newer things and newer ideas in A Series of Unfortunate Events.


Next week: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 7-9! Will I enjoy these next books more than I did 4-6? Let's hope so! It's much nicer to enjoy things than to not enjoy them!

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 1-3

           

Of all the literary blockbusters of the past decade, surely one of the strangest and most surprising successes is Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Unlike its fellow children's book bestsellers, A Series of Unfortunate Events is the only series that actively campaigns to turn readers away. The books famously sell themselves via reverse psychology: the blurb on each book's back cover urges readers not to rent, purchase, or in any way read the book they're holding. It's a clever marketing gambit, and one that Daniel Handler, the man behind Lemony Snicket, claims was genuine:

I wrote a list of ingredients in the book, and warnings that [readers] shouldn't consume those ingredients. ...it honestly hadn't occurred to me that it was reverse psychology. I just thought that it was sort of an honest assessment making clear that if you were timid or easily disturbed, you could turn away.

Rereading the first three Series of Unfortunate Events books for the first time in thirteen years, what surprised me most was indeed how honest Snicket's admonitions to the reader were. Despite its whimsy and wit, both of which are in plentiful supply, A Series of Unfortunate Events takes the exploitation of its child protagonists seriously and taps into some fairly dark moments in doing so.

The Series begins appropriately enough with The Bad Beginning. The three Baudelaire children stand on the shores of Briny Beach, and we are introduced to each of them in the first of many tripartite sequences, as actions/reactions of each Baudelaire child are described in turn. Violet is the eldest and a budding young inventor. Klaus, the middle child, is an avid reader. The infant Sunny is fond of biting things with her sharp little teeth. By design, the Baudelaires are relatively static characters. They arrive onstage mature, intelligent, and virtuous, and remain so throughout the rest of the series. They are mild-mannered lead characters, and what happens to them happens not because they heroically sought it out nor because they are being punished for wrongdoing. Their misfortune is accurately described by the series' title as simply "unfortunate events." Miserable things just happen to the Baudelaires, and it's not because they need to learn a lesson or grow up.