The book concluding the series that introduced a generation of young readers to obscure words and droll irony – a phrase here that means Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” – emphatically and literally is “The End.”
No more will readers endure the author’s halfhearted exhortations to put down the woeful tale of the three Baudelaire orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sunny. No more will readers weigh the significance of such peculiar devices as the stretch of “birdpaper” meant to trap avian couriers, or snicker at the dry wit that inspired the names of the Lucky Smells Lumber Mill, the Anxious Clown restaurant and a malicious vice principal named Nero.
Never again will readers fight the urge to leap ahead past a maddeningly lengthy reflection involving the author’s late love, Beatrice, or an instructive mini-dissertation on deadly fungi.
“The End” indisputably ends the chronicle that began, 13 years and books ago, with “The Bad Beginning,” in which the three Baudelaire children discover that a cataclysmic fire has consumed both their parents and their spacious home.
Even worse, their designated caretaker, Count Olaf, immediately revealed himself to be a nasty, verbose villain interested less in their welfare than in the sizable Baudelaire fortune, prompting a protracted game of hide-and-seek between the nefarious Olaf and the pitiable but plucky Baudelaires.
Appalled adults, rapt kids
The author’s original intent was to spoof children’s books, a genre he mistakenly assumed consisted entirely of feel-good narratives about admirable youths.
Adults who share this misconception – they tend to be cut from the same cloth as adults who view the Harry Potter series as a course in elementary witchcraft – were appalled by “The Bad Beginning.” These people disliked the very concept of a series chronicling the relentless miseries visited upon three blameless children.
Children, on the other hand, were in on the joke from the get-go. They embraced Snicket’s wry, acid humor. The author’s frequent entreaties to abandon his books in favor of other activities only inspired young readers to press on. “A Series of Unfortunate Events” became a publishing phenomenon.
If critics viewed Snicket’s recurring literary contrivances – the bemusing explanations of unfamiliar words, the whimsical cultural references – as predictable devices, invariably fans’ vocabularies expanded, along with their bookish horizons.
The put-down “cakesniffer” is on its way into the vernacular, thanks to Snicket’s memorable character Carmelita Spats, the former “tap-dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian”-turned-“ballplaying cowboy superhero soldier pirate.” (Carmelita Spats also has expanded the potential repertoire of imaginative Halloween costumes.)
After these books established such a weighty presence in their lives, Snicket’s fans found themselves torn between eagerly anticipating “The End,” released deliberately on Friday the 13th of this bleak month, and dreading it.
In “The End,” the meaning of “V.F.D.” – a cabalistic acronym that litters “A Series of Unfortunate Events” with the persistence of those static-y Styrofoam packing peanuts – finally is resolved. (Like the running gag itself, the explanation is anticlimactic.)
Loose ends are tied, sort of. Friends who proved villainous in earlier “Unfortunate” installments beg forgiveness. The Incredibly Deadly Viper reappears, offering deliverance in the form of a Biblical allegory.
Tides continue to wash treachery and flotsam ashore on the island where the Baudelaires find short-term salvation along with some answers.
But the answers, as results frequently do, lead to more questions. And those questions, like the Baudelaires in the final chapter, sail away on a sea of secrets.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
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The End
by Lemony Snicket
HarperCollins
Children’s, 368 pages, $12.99
