A Year of Unfortunate Events — Part the Seventh: The Beatrice Awakens

Hmm, more information about corvid migratory patterns than I had anticipated.

Happy 13th of the month, readers (both hypothetical and otherwise)! You know what that means: it's time for me to revisit another entry in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events!

Sticking with that intro?

Yes.

All right.

SPOILERS ahoy!

Do you wanna talk about Daniel Handler some more?

No. I mean, I'm still somewhat incredulous that he could be that lacking in self-awareness. But at least he has acknowledged that his behavior was inappropriate and hopefully in the future he'll endeavor to be less of a jackass. Anyway, we're here to talk about. . .

Book the Seventh – The Vile Village

So what did you remember about this book before re-reading it?

So I don't remember a lot of plot particulars, but I do remember that Olaf disguises himself as a private eye who has apprehended Count Olaf.

Is this "Count Olaf" actually someone else in a transparent disguise?

I'm pretty sure that it's Lemony Snicket's brother, Jacques. Don't hold me to that, though. This time around, Mr. Poe uses the aphorism, "It takes a village to raise a child," to justify his decision to place the Baudelaire Orphans in the care of a village seemingly plagued with crows. This is the extent of my memories of this book.

That's not a lot to go on.

Look, Hypothetical reader, there are a bunch of these books, the later ones all kind of blur together.

A ringing endorsement. All right, so now that you've re-read the book did you get everything right?

Not as such, no, but we'll get to that. So, we start off in Mr. Poe's office, where Violet (14), Klaus (12), and Sunny (1) Baudelaire are waiting to find out who will be their newest guardian and fuming at all the inaccuracies in a Daily Punctilio story about a "Count Omar" kidnapping the "Quagmire Twins." It turns out that none of their (increasingly) distant relations are in a rush to take them in, so Mr. Poe has enrolled them in a new program based on the aphori—

"It takes a village to raise a child."

Quite, anyway, he shows the children some brochures about local villages participating in the program but they select the one whose name is—

V.F.D.!

Yes, would you like to take over?

No, I haven't read the book.

All right, so Mr. Poe puts them on the bus to V.F.D. which stops about a mile outside of town. By the time they arrive at the Town Hall, they're sunburned, dusty, and windswept and unsettled to see that ever surface in the village is covered in crows. They make their way into the hall and are sidelined while the village elders insist on installing a new police chief who is—

Count Olaf?

No. A woman in a motorcycle helmet named Luciana. In any case, the Elders all wear crow hats and aren't so much interested in what the children have to say. Instead, they just let them know they're going to move in with Hector, the city's handyman, and that they'll be doing all the village's chores. That evening, while Hector prepares enchiladas, the Baudelaires tell him about the surviving Quagmire Triplets, Duncan and Isadora, and Hector tells them about V.F.D.'s history. It seems that the founders were so taken with the native crows unusual migratory patterns (downtown in the morning, uptown in the evening, and out to Nevermore tree at night) that they decided to found the Village of Fowl Devotees. Meanwhile, upon learning that Isadora writes rhyming couplets Hector reveals that he found a small scrap of paper with a couplet on it under Nevermore Tree that very morning.

The plot thickens.

Indeed, the next morning, and the next, the Baudelaires find more couplets, and while it takes them until near the end of the novel, a clever reader will realize that the poems form an acrostic that spells out FOUNTAIN, an obvious reference to the hideous crow-shaped fountain uptown. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Anyhow, Hector is super-afraid of the Elders, and with good reason. You see the penalty for breaking any of the villages thousands of rules is being burned at the stake, and Hector's been breaking a lot of rules. For example, he's breaking the village's ban on mechanical devices by building a self-sustaining air mobile home.

A what now?

A hot air balloon house. He's also collecting books that feature things that break the rules, which are also banned. Anyway, on their second day in V.F.D., the Baudelaires are summoned to the Town Hall where they're told that Luciana has apprehended Count Omar.

Do you mean Count Olaf?

Yes. Anyway, this guy does have a unibrow and an eye tattooed on his ankle, but he's also obviously not Count Om—Olaf. He says his name is Jacques, but the Elders won't listen to the Baudelaires and sentence him to be burned at the stake the next morning. So, the Baudelaires try and come up with a plan to save Jacques (it involved mob psychology), but by the time they get to the jail, they find out that Jacques has been murdered.

You could say it was a murder most fowl?

No, you couldn't, because the newly arrived Detective Dupin has deduced that the killer and her two accomplices are right there in V.F.D.! That's right, it appears that Jacques was bitten to death by four strong, sharp baby teeth.

It was the baby?

No, it obviously wasn't the baby, Dupin is Count Olaf, who is wearing big sunglasses to hide his unibrow and tall shoes to hide his tattoo. Anyway, Hector is too skittish to stand up for the Baudelaires in front of the Elders, and since he's their only alibi, they're taken to jail to be held until they can be burned at the stake the next day. And Dupin forces them to choose which two of them will burn and which one will be forced to live with him until they can claim their fortune.

Well, that got super dark.

 Don't worry, Hector's got a plan.

What's the plan?

If the Baudelaires escape, he'll take them with him when he flies away in his self-sustaining hot air mobile home.

That's not a plan.

It is not. Unfortuantely, this is shaping up to be Klaus's (now 13) worst birthday ever. Fortunately, Klaus has figured out Isadora's poem and knows that they can rescue their friends from inside of the Fowl Fountain. Also, Violet's figured out a way to turn their bread and water to in a machine that can wash away the mortar from their cell walls.

That's . . . actually slightly less improbable than the hypnotism in The Miserable Mill.

I know, right? Well, everything seems to be going well for the Baudelaires, they've escaped their cell, they've freed the Quagmires and they're on their way to Hector's house. Except that they're also being chased by an angry torch-wielding mob led by Count Olaf. As they get to Hector's, he flies by in the self-sustaining hot air mobile home and lowers a rope ladder. The Quagmires are able to climb aboard but Officer Luciana severs the ladder with a harpoon gun, and harpoons the notebooks that the Quagmires try to throw down to the Baudelaires. It seems like everything's lost, Hector can't fly back down for them and the V.F.D. villagers want to burn them at the stake, but what's this? Dupin has taken off his sunglasses and is definitely Count Olaf?

Will Luciana arrest him?

Of course, not, she's been Esmé Squalor in a transparent disguise this whole time. Well, transparent to the reader, that is.  Anyway, they skedaddle on a motorcycle and the Baudelaires decide they need to get out of dodge, after all, the Daily Punctilio's already run a story about them (well, "Veronica, Klyde, and Susie Baudelaire") murdering Count Omar. Sunny dramatically takes her first steps . . . towards the bus stop, I guess,while Klaus and Violet try to retrieve a few scraps of Duncan and Isadora's notebooks.

Okay, so you definitely didn't remember a whole lot.

Well, I remember less about the next one.

Good to know. So, it seems like this book finally breaks the series free of the last vestiges of its formula.

Not completely. Obviously all the allusions, Count Olaf's transparent disguises, and Lemony Snicket's tics — a word which here means "idiomatic grammatical gestures that identify the originator of a literary work" — remain until The End, but, if memory serves, this is the last time that we see the Baudelaires placed in the care of a new legal guardian at the beginning of the novel. From here on out the Baudelaire's are literally on their own in the world. While I don't remember my initial reaction to this status quo shifting development, on this reading it is a welcome change. By freeing himself from one of the constraints of the series' premise, Snicket allows himself the freedom to explore settings that would have seemed out of place earlier in the series.

You were less enthusiastic about the series last deviation from the formula in The Miserable Mill.

That's true, but I think The Miserable Mill might have made more sense if it had come after The Vile Village. There's always been an absurdist streak to the series, but The Miserable Mill strained credulity a little too much. But let's not re-litigate previous blog entries here. The point is, that while I enjoyed The vile Village, the formula is getting a bit stale. Of course, next month I'll probably find that I've exaggerated the extent to which Snicket is breaking away from the familiar. In any case, as with Olaf's kidnapping of the Quagmires, once again this novel ratchets up the series' stakes. Which is a necessity in a series as long as this one.

Are you sure? I mean, they are already dealing with a recurring threat from a murderous failed actor whose ability to track them borders on precognition.

Uh-oh.

What do you mean "uh-oh?"

I think I may have opened a Pandora's box with that comment about strained credulity. Let's put a pin in that for now and get back to the stakes.

Okay.

Like you were saying, the stakes have always been pretty high. You know, being pursued by a murderer with an Ahab-like obsession with obtaining your trust fund would be pretty harrowing. However, familiarity breeds contempt and—

But we're already contemptuous of Olaf.

Of course we are, but as time passes and we see Olaf repeatedly fail to kidnap the Baudelaires we'll start to ask if he's really that dangerous.

Oh, like the Worf Effect?

Yeah, like the Worf Effect. So, by now Snicket's added another layer of danger by making the children into accused murderers on the run from the law.

But doesn't he also relieve some pressure as well?

I don't follow you.

The Quagmire Triplets are no longer in the clutches of Count Olaf. Sure, they are stuck with a coward in his self-sustaining hot air mobile home, but that's gotta be better than a notorious murderer.

Indeed. I will admit that I was surprised to see the Quagmires stuck with Olaf for nearly two books. In any case, I'm glad that Snicket is willing to play with the formula, it was getting frustrating seeing even the Baudelaire's in the care of such inept, corrupt, or uncaring guardians.

But now they have no guardians at all, how is that better for them?

Uh. . . So, the song for this one is pretty good right?

UGH!

Join us next month for The Hostile Hospital.

Are you really not going to mention that it's an actual Friday 13th?

Nope.

Links:

The Gothic Archies' song from this book's audiobook, "Crows" is, in fact, pretty good. And when I have a sore throat I can do a passable Stephin Merritt impression.

Join us next month for The Hostile Hospital.

So. . . how's it feel to be over the hump?

What?

It's the middle book in the series. There are officially fewer upcoming entries in this feature than previous entries.

Oh, well, I've been lying on the couch sick as a dog all day, so I haven't really thought about that.

Wait? You waited until the night before posting to finish this?

YOU'RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR!