A Year of Unfortunate Events — Part the Twelfth: Terror by Beatrice

I'm not sure if you can see it from here, but Sunny looks pretty cool with sunglasses.

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!

So, in our last outing you declared that The Grim Grotto was pretty good because it sidelined the villains and brought back a sense of narrative momentum.

Yes, but Lemony Snicket's author-ly tics were still starting to rub me the wrong way.

Fair enough.

Anyway, let's jump into:

Book the Twelfth: The Penultimate Peril

So, what do you remember about this book going in?

Well, it involves Kit Snicket, sister of Jacques and Lemony, a pregnant V.F.D. volunteer and former paramour of Count Olaf.

Eww, is the baby—

His? Almost definitely not, also you don't learn about their previous relationship until the next book. Anyway, the Baudelaires and Ms Snicket are at the Hotel Denouement, which you may recall is the last safe place for a meeting of volunteers. However, Olaf plans to burn down the hotel so that he can set fires with impunity.

How much of this do you actually remember and how much have you reconstructed from what you've recently re-read.

Um . . . can I avail myself of my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Well, this isn't a court and it wouldn't be a crime, so. . . I guess.

Sweet!

Well, now that you've re-read it, what did you get right?

Some. Let's just jump in. The very pregnant Kit Snicket informs the Baudelaires (Violet, 15; Klaus, 13; Sunny, somehow still 1) that they're going to infiltrate the Hotel Denouement as flaneurs.

Pardon?

Unremarkable bystanders who are well-placed to make important observations.

Okay, but how? Doesn't everyone think they're arsonists and murders due to the stories in The Daily Punctilio?

Yes, but Kit's providing them with disguises, they're going to dress up as concierges and liaise with a volunteer named Frank in order to determine if a recently checked-in guest going by the initials J.S. is impersonating Jacques Snicket for noble or villainous reasons. This is further complicated by the fact that Frank's twin brother, Ernest, is also a manager at the Hotel and is on the other side of the schism. So, all the Baudelaires have to do is figure out if the upcoming meeting of volunteers should be cancelled and figure out a way to signal this to Kit Snicket.

What about Hector and the Quagmires?

What about them? Oh right, so this is where they finally might show back up. That's one of the other things that might happen. Anyway, as soon as the Baudelaires show up at the hotel, they meet either Frank or Ernest where they find out that the whole hotel is organized via the Dewey Decimal System.

Not Library of Congress?

No, apparently they didn't get that memo. Anyway, they have to split up to help three different guests. Unsurprisingly, they're all people they've met before. Violet is called up to the roof where Carmelita Spats, now a ball-playing cowboy superhero soldier pirate, wants a harpoon gun. Meanwhile, Klaus encounters Sir and Charles from the Lucky Smells Lumbermill who need help finding the hotel sauna (Sir doesn't care about the supposed health benefits, he just likes the smell of hot wood). Sunny comes across Vice Principal Nero, Mr. Remora, and Mrs. Bass from Prufrock Prep, who've been lured to the hotel by Esmé Squalor in what appears to be a thinly-veiled scheme to steal their belongings. She also comes across Hal from the Heimlich Hospital records room. By the end of these separate errands each of the Baudelaires has agreed to help either Frank or Ernest or possibly a third person with some sort of risky scheme.

Okay, so obviously Carmelita intends to shoot something out of the air, but what do the other Baudelaires get involved in.

Oh, so Klaus, at the direction of either Frank or Ernest (or possibly a third person) hangs a giant sheet of flypaper, or birdpaper as the case may be, out of the sauna window, and Sunny, likewise at the request of someone who might be any of those three, attaches a Vernacularly Fastened Door device to the laundry room. Anyway, afterwards they meet up in the lobby and find that they can't quite add up anything that they've observed and wonder how two people can be in three places at once. They're about to go to sleep when suddenly someone who looks like either Frank or Ernest approaches them and reveals himself to be—

Their identical triplet!

Yes. It's Dewey Denouement, who has devoted his life to compiling and storing information about V.F.D., the schism, and various other topics and he's hidden it all under the reflecting pond.

Come again?

Did I not mention the reflecting pond?

You did not.

Oh, so all the text on the hotel is backwards (which leads to some "fun" mirrored text in the book), and all the windows are labelled with their Dewey Decimal numbers, and there's a reflecting pond in front of the hotel.

I think I get it.

Oh good.

This whole thing has been a rip-off of Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar.

No, the only similarity is that they are children's books that feature a vertical structure contrasted with a horizontal image of said structure. Anyway, Dewey also reveals that there are actually two J.S.es coming to the hotel and that neither is an impostor. They're actually Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor. Both feel quite guilty about how they've let down the Baudelaires and have spent their time since The Bad Beginning and The Ersatz Elevator trying to put things right by clearing up their legal situation.

Hmm, this seems suspiciously like the point in the novel when everything goes horribly wrong.

You're right, things can't be going that well for the Baudelaires, and once they return to the lobby with Dewey and Justice Strauss and Jerome, they're confronted by Count Olaf and (eventually) his cronies. A confrontation that ends with someone getting shot with a harpoon gun!

Is it the person best positioned to help the children out of their current predicament?

No, it's Dewey.

Wait, who do you think would be the best person to help them?

Justice Strauss, she's arranged a trial and everything, and all sorts of people are bringing evidence and—

Whatever, so I assume that the harpooning occurs in such a manner that Olaf can plausibly blame it on the Baudelaires.

That would be a correct assumption. In any case, the next day, the High Court convenes in the lobby of the Hotel Denouement in order to determine the guilt or innocence of Count Olaf and the Baudelaires, respectively. Only, everyone but the justices are blindfolded.

Because someone took "Justice is blind" literally?

Yes. Anyhow, the Baudelaires risk a contempt of court charge by peeking and learn two things: A) Count Olaf is attempting to kidnap Justice Strauss, and 2) the other justices of the High Court are the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard. The Baudelaires attempt to rescue Justice Strauss and find themselves helping Olaf answer the questions to open the Vernacularly Fastened Door, only—

The thing that's supposed to be there (probably the sugar bowl) isn't there.

It is not. So Olaf decides he might as well poison everyone with the Medusoid Mycelium until Sunny makes a surprising suggestion: "Burn the hotel."

Well, shit!

I know, right. But then you find out that she thought it was the best way to signal Kit and the other volunteers to let them know that the hotel was no longer safe. Anyway, the Baudelaires try to warn as many people as possible to get out of the hotel, but the fates of such characters as Sir, Charles, Mr Remora, Mrs Bass, Vice Principal Nero, Hal, Jerome Squalor, Esmé Squalor, Carmelita Spats, Justice Strauss, Frank, Ernest, Hugo, Colette, Kevin, the follicularly-described villains are left ambiguous as Violet constructs a parachute system that allows the boat in the rooftop pool to glide from the rooftop to the ocean as the burning hotel collapses. Reluctantly, the Baudelaires sail off with Count Olaf.

Well, that's kind of a lot of stuff.

It is.

What did you think of the book?

It does a good job of continuing the narrative momentum re-established in The Grim Grotto and in pointing towards the series' ultimate resolution, which we'll talk about next month. But yeah, this book had a lot of strengths.

Oh?

First,  Lemony Snicket managed to strike the right balance of actual story content and comic digressions, there wasn't any point where I found myself rolling my eyes wishing that he would just get on with it. So, yeah, good on that. The book also does a good job selling the moral ambiguity of the Baudelaire's situation at the Hotel Denouement. In fact, it's basically a trust-no-one spy thriller. The Baudelaires are left with nothing but their own observations (and their own moral compass) to determine who is noble and who is not. This is reinforced by the section in which each Baudelaire must attend to some crisis individually and the reader is left to decide which order to read those chapters in.

You didn't mention that part.

Oh, yeah. So, just before the chapter where Violet deals with Esmé and Carmelita, there's a note saying that the following three chapters happen concurrently and can be read in any order. While I read them in the order presented, I think that kids would love the idea that they get to decide how the story unfolds. I mean, I know I loved the trademarked series of branching path books as a kid. Anyway, this simple narrative gimmick perfectly mates the story's themes and form so that they reinforce each other which is a neat trick. Also, the Baudelaires' uncertainly works well with the growing moral ambiguity of the story.

Particularly when you think about how black and white the morality was at the beginning.

Yeah. . . yeah. . .  Huh? You know what, let's put a pin in that until next month. Let's just talk about moral ambiguity in the context of this book. The Baudelaires definitely do some questionable stuff in their time as concierges at the Hotel Denouement. Mainly because, in their role as observers, they don't feel like they have enough information to decide whether they're doing the right thing or not.

But then they decide to burn down the hotel and join Count Olaf.

They do.

Want to expand on that?

Sure. The ending complicates the theme of moral ambiguity. So, at the end, the Baudelaires agree to help Olaf escape and flee with him because they don't think they can receive a fair shake in a world where people like the man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard can be justices on the high court. Meanwhile, Sunny decides they should burn down the hotel (which is still full of people, many of them blindfolded) to signal to their allies that the hotel is no longer a safe meeting place. I'd say that neither of those actions is particularly ambiguous. And while the Baudelaires do attempt to minimize casualties, they definitely commit an arson which leads to deaths ( I mean, that's never going to be confirmed in the books, but it doesn't seem like it's possible that everyone survived). This does still work in the framework of the series since it places the protagonists at their lowest point immediately proceeding the ending. That said, if you're trying to make a series where the moral is that morality can be complicated and ambiguous, maybe deciding that your characters should participate in surely deadly fire is counterproductive.

But isn't the point of writing a morally ambiguous story to underline the fact that sometimes there isn't a good choice.

Yeah, but it still seems a little extreme. So, we'll see how it all shakes out next month.

Okay. Anything else that stood out in the book?

When Sunny finds out about the blindfolds she says, "Scalia," to highlight the absurdity of such a literal-minded interpretation.

Solid burn.

Yep. Anyway, join us next month for a discussion of The End to find out if this whole experience has been worthwhile.

Links:

So, here's the penultimate Gothic Archies tie-in song, "Things Are Not What They Appear," it's a little slow, but thematically appropriate.