A Year of Unfortunate Events — Part the Eleventh: The Reverse of the Beatrice

Huh, my hand looks like it's at a weird angle in this picture.

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!

Okay, last we checked in you were feeling a tad burnt out on all things A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Well, not all things, mostly Lemony Snicket's stylistic tics.

Fair enough. Do you still feel that way.

Since I write the opening pretty soon after I post the previous entry, yes.

Okay, so what do you remember abo—

Hey, I'm the one who gets to say that this is where we talk about Book the Eleventh: The Grim Grotto.

Fine, what do you remember about it.

It involves a submarine and mushrooms.

That's it?

It might also reveal what became of Hector's self-sustaining hot-air mobile home.

Okay, but you thought that about The Slippery Slope and you were wrong.

Well, we'll see.

Do I need to bother asking if your memories were correct if you didn't really remember anything?

I guess not. Let's jump in. So, you may recall that at the end of The Slippery Slope the Baudelaire Orphans (Violet, 14; Klaus, 13; and Sunny, 1) were separated from their friend Quigley Quagmire and hurtling down the stricken stream clutching onto a toboggan.

I do recall that.

Good, because that's exactly where this book picks up. Only, in the very first chapter they find themselves rescued by a surfacing submarine.

A submarine that fits in a stream?

It's a big stream. Anyway, once they're aboard they meet Captain Widdershins of the Queequeg, a V.F.D. volunteer who's looking for them, and the sugar bowl.

The one with the evidence of Olaf's crimes?

I may have been wrong about that. But it's an important sugar bowl. Anyhow, the Queequeg has been kept up to date on the Baudelaires' travails via Volunteer Factual Dispatches. Unfortunately, they've been incommunicado because many of the submarine's systems (including the telegraph) are broken.

Hey, maybe Violet can fix them!

Yeah. They also need a researcher to help the captain's step-daughter, Fiona, decipher tide charts to figure out where the sugar bowl was carried by the currents. Oh, and a sous-chef to assist the Queequeg's new cook, Phil.

The optimist from The Miserable Mill?

The very same. After a brief run-in with a giant octopus-shaped submersible that may be (read, definitely is) carrying Count Olaf, Klaus determines that the sugar bowl has most likely been deposited in an area on the map marked "G.G."

As in The Grim Grotto?

Actually, it's the Gorgonian Grotto, named for the Medusoid Mycelium fungus that can be found there.

If only there were a mycologist aboard the Queeqeg.

Oh, there is. It's Fiona. BTW, did I mention that Fiona is a little older than Violet and might have a crush on Klaus, because Captain Widdershins certainly has. Anyway, they decide to go into the Grotto, which means that the Baudelaires and Fiona will have to suit up in old-timey dive suits to look for the sugar bowl. Long story short, they don't find it. But they do find that there's an open air cavern inside.

Is the sugar bowl there?

No. But they do find some wasabi!

Oh, well, that's always handy.

Yeah, also they're trapped in the cavern by an outbreak of fungus!

That's bad!

Don't worry, the fungus waxes and wanes so they just have to wait it out.

That's good!

But they have to stay there overnight, and Violet discovers something that might change the way her siblings see Fiona.

Oh, does she tell them right away?

Of course not. 1) Fiona's still there and it would be rude; and, B) it wouldn't build plot tension. Anyway, once they're able to head back to the Queegueg they find that the submarine has been abandoned and Phil and Widdershins's dive suits are missing. Fiona embraces her stepfather's motto ("He—

Or she!

Aye! Or she who hesitates is lost!") and takes command of the submarine. Only there are two little problems: A) Sunny is showing signs of fungal infection and is forced to stay in her diving helmet until the others can find a cure, and 2) Olaf's octopus submarine has consumed the Queequeg (now crewed by enslaved former Snow Scouts). Olaf has the Hook-handed man escort the children to the brig while the crew is subjected to Carmelita Spats's Tap-dancing Fairy Princess Ballerina Veterinarian Dance Recital. In the brig, we finally find out what Violet was so worked up about, a newspaper clipping from the Daily Punctilio identifying the Hook-handed man as Fiona's older brother Fernald.

Dun-dun-duuuuuuuhhhhhnnnnn!

Indeed. Anyway, Fernald helps them escape back to the Queegueg but they're separated, so while the Baudelaires discover that the Medusoid Mycelium can be driven off by Horseradish—

Good thing they found that wasabi.

Yes. After they use the wasabi to cure Sunny's infection, and receive a coded dispatch telling them to go back to Briny Beach. However, Olaf shows up to tell them that Fiona has joined Olaf's troupe—

I'm calling bullshit on that one.

But Fernald is her only family and so on.

Whatever.

However, Fiona, who Olaf has instructed to take the Baudelaires back to the Brig, instead allows the Baudelaires to escape. After some quick jerry-rigging, the Queequeg is sea-worthy enough to get them to the Briny Beach, where they're reunited with Mr. Poe. But it turns out that their actual contact is one Ms Kit Snicket, who's posing as a taxi driver waiting to take them to the Hotel Denouement.

And that's it?

Yeah, that's it.

So, what did you think on this go 'round?

Well, I actually think the somewhat more self-contained narrative of The Grim Grotto was an improvement on the convoluted mass of revelations found in The Slippery Slope. Sure, Snicket's digressions are still getting on my nerves, but keeping the Baudelaires together with a new potential ally (and minimizing the presence of the villains in the story) helped to keep the momentum going in this entry.

Then you think you'll be able to make it?

Well, I mean, the sunk costs fallacy says that I basically have to keep on reading the series since I'm so close to the end.

That's hardly a glowing recommendation.

I guess not. But that said, this is the first book where the series has shown anything resembling forward momentum since The Hostile Hospital. And you might say—

But Lucas, that's only two books worth of wheel spinning in an eleven book series.

To which I would reply: these books are getting long enough that the wheel spinning is kind of torturous. With that said, this book has effectively won me back over. I just think that it's starting to feel like Snicket got a little too attached to writing a series of thirteen books with thirteen chapters.

Speaking of Snicket, how's the writing in this one.

Like I said, there are a few things that are really starting to bug me. The digressions were charming at first but now I'm at the point where I just want to find out where the story is going. So any time this book started to veer off into a discussion of the Water Cycle—

Wait, what does the Water Cycle have to do with any of this?

Snicket wants to write about something boring to get you to read something else instead of A Series of Unfortunate Events. You know, so you won't get bummed out.  Anyway, it also bugged me that he got it wrong. See he says that the Water Cycle comprises three phenomena: Evaporation, Precipitation, and Collection, but he's left out Condensation, which is a pretty importan—wait a minute, this sort of errant pedantry isn't doing anyone any favors. Let's just cut to my biggest gripe about the latest development of the series.

Do tell.

Okay, so maybe it makes sense for a series of kids' books to want to encourage reading, but over time the books begin to offer up a moral code based on being well-read and liking the right kinds of Literature. Which is something I just can't get behind. Quigley first offers up this suggestion in the previous book, and this book takes it even further, talking about the portraits of authors that appear on the uniforms of various VFD submarine crews on either side of the schism. For example, the crew of the Queequeg wears uniforms with—

Let me guess, Herman Melville.

Correct, while the crew of Olaf's sub wear portraits of Edgar Guest (you may remember him from the reference to his work back in The Bad Beginning). Anyway, while I would agree that sharing a taste in books is a good way of finding friends, discourse about books you disagree about is also a good way of making friends. Also, I find it has little bearing on morality.

What about grown-ass adults who still take the work of Ayn Rand seriously?

Pretty sure they've given up on making friends anyway.

Solid burn, if a bit hypocritical.

It just sometimes feels like people take differences of opinion about art and pop culture as some kind of personal affront. The whole notion that reading more (and reading the right things) makes you into a better person just sort of rubs me the wrong way. Books can broaden your horizons and even expand your thinking on moral issues, but they aren't enough to make you a good person or to indicate if you are one.

But one of the major themes of the series is also the moral ambiguity of the adult world, isn't it? So maybe the whole "reading-based-morality" thing isn't quite as cut-and-dried as you're making it out to be.

Maybe not. Like I said, I enjoyed this entry more than the last two, and I think the series is heading in a more interesting direction. Enough so that I'm actually looking forward to The Penultimate Peril next month.

Links:

The song for this book is "A Million Mushrooms" which is a little meh.