The Awful End

It is said that when the King of England first visited Christopher Wren's Cathedral of St. Paul, he said it was "Amusing, awful and artificial"--an exercise in the changing nature of English, as the words then meant "amazing, awe-inspiring and artistic."

Does that apply to Lemony Snicket's "The End?" Well, that depends on how you look at it. I started the series back in the day, when it was offered an something fun to read while waiting for the next Harry Potter. And it was amusing--in the current meaning--a clever twist on the earnest Victorian books that showed Our Hero, who was Honest and True, overcoming adversity and earning riches and rewards. I have actually read at least one book by Horatio Alger, where Our Hero was oppressed by a nasty stepfather (even his wife called him "Mr. Tarbox"), but escaped to the gold fields of California to strike it rich.

Of course, the exact opposite happens to the Baudelaires, which was clever. As the books progressed, I enjoyed the silliness--Count Olaf posing as "Detective Dupin," a reference to Edgar Allen Poe's detective of the Murder on the Rue Morgue. I failed to make the connection myself, but someone pointed out that J(erome).D. Salinger had written something called "To Esme, With Love and Squalor." Hence Jerome and Esme Squalor in The Esatz Elevator.

Sunny's speech was also cleverly allusive. As she learned to cook--in The Slippery Slope, I believe--she offered an appetizer with the phrase "amuse bouche"--literally something to amuse one's mouth. (A dedicated fan created a Sunny dictionary here.)

The books were rife with anagrams--the first I spotted was "Al Funcoot," the "author" of the play in which Olaf was going to marry Violet for the Baudelaire fortune. "Al Funcoot" of course rearranges to "Count Olaf."

But then I found some boards--and the dedicated and even obsessive fans who were looking to find hidden messages and deeper secrets that would reveal more about the story. Did you know that one of the patients in The Hostile Hospital was "Laura V. Bleediotie" which is an anagram for "Violet Baudelaire?" They discussed who "Beatrice" was--and I had thought it was just a nod to Dante, so I had skimmed it, smiled briefly, and moved on.

Was there more that I had just missed? Was there deep structure and a tightly cohesive story that ran beneath the books like a secret passageway--and that could be found only by serieous deciphering of various codes? Did I need to carefully parse The Unauthorized Autobiography and The Beatrice Letters to get ready for all the hidden meanings in the last book?

Then I read "The End." And while it ties up some threads, it leaves very very many unaddressed--even unacknowledged. There are more clever allusions--everyone who lives on the island is named after a famous literary island dweller: Robinson and Friday: Miranda, Alonso, Ferdinand, Caliban and Ariel; Omeros and Calypso. The "facilitator" of the island is named Ismael, and keeps repeating "Call me Ish."

The book also cleverly inverts the story of Eden: here, as all are dying, a serpent offers an apple that saves everyone's lives. There is plenty of clever wordplay, such as "read the end of The End from the end of The End and not from the beginning of The End." All are hallmarks of the entire series, and this one is certainly a match for all that came before.

As a finale, however, it asks more questions than it answers. What happened to the Quigley triplets? Is Fiona really evil, or is there hope for Klaus' broken heart? Will the Baudelaires ever come into their fortune? Is VFD really just "Volunteer Fire Department?" Then why all the secret passages and codes and costumes and child-snatching? Why is the sugar bowl so important?

But, in the end, the story got away from him. "Lemony Snicket" seeded his books liberally with false leads, possible story lines, red herrings--far too many to be resolved in a single book. Which he acknowledges with long discussions of how stories have no real beginning and no real end, that they cannot be fully encompassed, that they are like the infinite layers of an onion, with new stories being revealed.

Which I find very reassuring. Sure, I had missed some clever allusions, some neat puzzles, but there was not an entire story that I had completely missed. Jasper Fforde (another of my favorite funny authors) has said that as he writes, he puts things into the books so that he can pick them up later--even though he has no idea what they are going to be when he first writes them. Perhaps that is what happened with The Series of Unfortunate Events. Perhaps Lemony Snicket will write further series--the Quigley triplets would be a natural. And, of course, I will read them.

I do still want to know what "a wet viper perm" is supposed to be an anagram of.