A Series of Unfortunate Events

This weekend, for my son Will’s birthday, we’ll be taking a crew of boys to the movies. And the film of choice will be A Series of Unfortunate Events. But before going to see the film, I decided to crack the books. The books have been favorites with the kids, and we have something like ten volumes of the series lying around, so I got my hands on ‘The Bad Beginning: Book the First’ last night and finished it this morning. It was great.

And now I’ve just finished ‘Book the Second: The Reptile Room’. And it was as good. The writing is wonderful. Throughout the books, which are offered as a retelling of these unfortunate events in the voice of Lemony Snicket, our storyteller frequently turns directly to the reader to offer a funny but practical definition of a term used or to describe some dramatic element as in these snippets of an excerpt which describe “dramatic irony”.

There is a type of situation which occurs all to often and which is occurring at this point in the story of the Baudelaire orphans, called “dramatic irony”. Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning.

…

As you and I listen to Uncle Monty tell the three Baudelaire orphans that no harm will ever come to them in the Reptile Room, we should be experiencing the strange feeling that accompanies the arrival of dramatic irony.

…

For no matter how safe and happy the three children felt, no matter how comforting Uncle Monty’s words were, you and I know that soon Uncle Monty will be dead and the Baudelaires will be miserable again.

In fact, from the book’s dedication “For Beatrice – My love for you shall last forever. You, however, did not.”, to the rear cover warnings that remind readers that they are “free to put this book back on the shelf and seek something lighter”, the books are draped in dark foreboding and doom.

They remind me of the dark, but still tremendously amusing, works of Edward Gorey, of whom I am a big fan. When my daughter wondered how it is that these books come off as funny, when the story is so tragic, I didn’t have much of an an answer. But I shared a copy of Gorey’s classic and grisly alphabet book The Gashlycrumb Tinies with her. I guess it’s the same reason we can laugh at someone else’s painful fall in a ‘Funniest Videos’ episode. Sometimes we just have to laugh at pain and misery, especially if it’s someone else’s.

A am very much looking forward to catching up on the nine books in the Unfortunate Events series that I still have to read. Will Count Olaf be the villain in all of them? Can he succeed at stealing the Baudelaire fortune from these unfortunate orphans? Can Lemony Snicket maintain the story, or will the formula get tired? Will the movie be any good? I don’t know, but it looks promising.

For further reading:

Dastardly Good
The Washington Post, 12/17/04

Out of This World: The Designer Behind ‘Lemony Snicket’
The Washington Post, 12/18/04