“A Series of Unfortunate Events” could have been the coolest most intriguing books of all time. As the end of the Harry Potter series draws closer, and fans look for resolution of the major and minor plot points set forth by J.K. Rowling in the previous novels, I am reminded of the huge disappointment felt by most if not all of the readers of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” as they read the the final book in the series “The End”. This set of books gained quite a lot of popularity, and many of my friends said they liked it better than the Potter series.
I personally had a hard time getting into these books, mostly because the first five had the same basic plot. However, I became extremely interested in this series as it became apparent that the real story of interest was that of the author and his connection to the mysterious secret society of VFD. Like most of the reader I was dying to know the real connection between Lemony Snicket, the Baudelaires, and Beatrice. By and large, the protagonists in this series, the Baudelaire orphans, are quite static and the reader doesn’t care any more for them then he or she would if they were any other children experiencing the same thing, but the plot was the driving force behind readership. I participated in several forums and other websites that theorized about what would become of the Baudelaire’s and their nemesis, Count Olaf. There were also around 100 other plot points that needed resolution for the reader to be satisfied.
Unfortunately, in the final book all Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) did was to introduce new plot points and then say something like you won’t find out the answers to the questions you have, but sometimes there are things in life that we just don’t know about. Quite frankly, this was the first philosophical portion of any of these novels. The other night I was thinking about what the author could have done to properly finish off these novels, and I came up with an idea that I thought was so great that I was extremely disappointed that Lemony Snicket didn’t think of it too. In one of the novels there is a code introduced called the Siebald code. Basically, the code starts whenever the word “ring” appears in the text. After its appearance every ninth word is kept and the other words are discarded. This continues until the word “ring” appears again.
To those who were disappointed by book the 13 of “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, how would you have felt if you read this seemingly pointless novel, only to analyze it further to find the answers to all of your questions explained by the Siebald code? Then, just at the end of Lemony Snicket’s secret message there was a note telling you the secret location of the last safe place of VFD and how to get in once you found it? During the writing of the novels, it would have been easy for Daniel Handler to construct a secret, out-of-the-way, underground structure and decorate it in the style of a VFD safe place. Most readers would have been hesitant to actually go to such a place, but some of them would have, and once it was discovered, how cool would that have been. I think the publicity and popularity of something like that would have been extremely hard to top. So, to Lemony Snicket, “If you ever read this, you totally blew it.”
