:: A Series of Unfortunate Events ::

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Dramatic irony, I venture to say, is not prevelant in children's literature today; multiple pages explaining the concept are far rarer. Lemony Snicket's second volume relating the unfortunate events of the Baudelaire children, admirably fills this void: "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....This feeling [of experiencing dramatic irony] is not unlike the sinking in one's stomach when one is in an elevator that suddenly goes down, or when you are snug in bed and your closet door suddenly creaks open to reveal the person who has been hiding there." Reading a children's book series as it transforms a literary concept into something as visceral and as any traditional childhood trauma, I am simply in awe, having discovered in a most unlikely place (which is the only place I ever seem to discover anything) a literary masterpiece.

Apparently, Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events has been fortunately quite successful. The word "successful" here means "a Jim Carrey movie is in the works." It is a great feeling to know that there is a popular series of children's book that can be praised more effusively than "at least kids are reading." I'm still stinging from the overwhelming rejection of Babe: Pig in the City, a brilliantly felliniesque film I will write of in greater length at some point on this webpage. Suffice it to say for now that I have never seen a film quite like Pig in the City, yet despite a fair amount of critical praise (Gene Siskel's final pick as a film of the Year), it floundered at the box office, leading directly to the termination of the head of a film studio (as Randy Newman observed, the idea that a studio was ruined after hiring the director of Mad Max to do a children's movie sounds like a great movie idea itself). Pig in the City failed, I believe, because it was deemed by some as "too dark" for children. "Too dark" here means "shows the full emotional consequences of acts of violence," and certainly we don't want that. But I digress, which here means "gets back to talking about the books" (and I promise that's the last definition).

The "Bad" in the title of the first book, The Bad Beginning is redundant, for we are assured all beginnings, middles and ends in this series will be bad. The Baudelair siblings are destined for horrible things, as we see immediately in the first book, when their parents are incinerated in a fire which also consumes all their belongings. That sets a tone the book carries on through the volumes I've read so far. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, you're not alone; the author frequently suggests that, while he is compelled to offer forth a testimony of the suffering of the Baudelair children, nothing is keeping the reader from putting the book down. In less skilled hands, the authorial interjections, and Lemony Snicket's own backstory, might grow annoying, but Daniel Handler (aka Mr. Snicket) is able to seamlessly weave in Snicket as a character in the novels (giving the young reader a lesson in perspective to supplement the irony).

The Baudelair orphans' are shipped off to live with Count Olaf, a decision casually made by their trustee Mr. Poe, and just one of the many casual choices he makes which serve to ruin the childrens' lives. Count Olaf is determined to swindle away the children's inheritance, via inane plots no adults seem capable of seeing through. You may have noticed a trend; adults are not particularly astute, nor of particular use to the children. The legal system wretches them away from the kindly judge they wish to live with, while their second host is murdered by Count Olaf after being unable to see Olaf's plainly sinister nature as evidence of anything more than herpetological envy. This open contempt for adults is probably a main reason Snicket is so often compared to Roald Dahl, with his notion from Matilda that children should be able to punish adults when they do wrong.

Personally, my first instinct is to make the other obvious link, to Edward Gorey, as well as Shel Silverstein (whose own carreer is probably closest to Handler's, writing separately for children and adults, though adults probably enjoy the children's works best). But ultimately, A Series of Unfortunate Events stands on its own, a remarkable effort to bring an ersatz gothic story, the sort of story "in which terrible things happen to small children," to a mass audience. When the children remember the deceased Uncle Monty as "brilliant," this is their definition: "Even in the bleak circumstances of their current situation, even throughout the series of unfortunate events that would happen to them for the rest of their lives, Uncle Monty and his kindness would shine in their memories....Nobody could ever dismantle the way the Baudelaires would think of him." By that definition, I am certainly just one of many fans young and old who would not hesitate to call Lemony Snicket brilliant.