Ok, I don’t know what the target age group of this series is, but I am thoroughly enjoying Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. (There, I said it!)
‘The Ersatz Elevator’ has left the deepest impression on me so far. I was so enamoured by its haunting atmosphere. True, where the other stories involve lakes, mountains and villages, this takes place entirely inside one apartment. But the 71-bedroom penthouse apartment at 667 Dark Avenue - home to the meek Jerome and the flamboyant Esme Gigi Geniveve Squalor - with its constant under current of the sinister was so fascinating. This book was also a favourite because this was the one where the story really moved forward and we took the first steps towards unravelling the mystery … what lay on the other end of the trap door of the elevator shaft was really exciting!
Following the two Quagmire triplets and VFD, the Baudelaire children next reached ‘The Vile Village’, whose inhabitants’ interpretation of “It takes a village to raise a child” is “Get three children to do all our chores.” With Mr. Poe’s exit, the children seem to be truly on their own from this point on, as they try to decipher secret messages from the triplets. Other than the exciting clues, and the very shocking appearance of one Jacques Snicket, I was also quite struck by the stark image of the endless stretch of flat land with a distant village, covered eternally by a thick cloud of crows. Oh, and I thought ‘Detective Dupin’ with his garish clothes and declamations of “not cool” was hilarious!
While I found ‘The Hostile Hospital’ to be the weakest one, I did enjoy its abnormally funny scenes. An infant who has just learnt to stand on her feet, and still speaks gibberish for the most part, wears a white gown and fools everyone into believing she is a nurse, about to perform a craniectomy! This story also took us to a very important twist with the discovery of the 13th page of the Snicket file in the Library of Records.
Disguises came to a head in ‘The Carnivorous Carnival’, which saw the children transformed to a two-headed human and a wolf baby in a world of such “freaks” as an ambidextrous man and a contortionist woman. This book was also the greatest comment on the base nature of humanity, which makes a one-armed man call a two-armed man a freak, and crowds enthuse about watching people being thrown to starving lions.
I also really like the way words or themes are used consistently. Example, the author’s repeated entreaties to not read such terrible books, Mr. Poe’s constant coughing, the explanatory “a word, which here means–”, the over-the-top anecdotes, the dedications to Beatrice, the letter to the editor with clues for the next story, the tie-in of the author to the plot, and of course, the all-pervading Eye: it’s these small things that bind all the stories together and give the reader a sense of being part of a complete adventure.
The story has come a long way from being just a series of unfortunate events. There is so much more than meets the eye (pun unintentional!) and I can’t wait to follow the clues in Madame Lulu’s documents to get to Mortmain Mountains. For now we leave the story of the Baudelaire children on a cliffhanger. Literally.
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