Post by Ennui on Oct 31, 2012 8:58:19 GMT -5
Gosh. Well, obviously, I enjoyed that very much; it lasted about two tube journeys...
But it's a difficult one to react to. Lots of us have tried our hands at writing VFD prequel stories, and here comes along the real thing to show us where we went wrong and (less often) right.
This is in one way a bit like our various efforts in that the prose style is so radically different from the Lemony we knew before, Edward Gorey arch, slightly camp, melange of Gothic taste and New York wit suddenly going so delightfully hard boiled and unforgiving.
In every way...this is not what we expected. We played parlour games enlarging on the pasts of favourite minor characters, and trying out the VFD codes whose keys we'd been granted in the Unauthorised Autobiography and the later Baudelaire stories. In other words we pencilled in old stuff. But instead, this new book is almost entirely new territory.
The one really solid reference - Hector's bizarre little apparition at the end - even felt a bit wrong to me, after we'd been sedulously trained to give up on that sort of reassurance and enjoy, basically, a new scene/world/cast.
That's why a few theories here - that Theodora is to do with Olaf or a certain sinister and hairy villainess, that Stain'd might be near Mount Fraught, that bells=Sebald code (which I'd bet money we'll never see/hear again, these codes are jokes and that one has outstayed its welcome), that central characters might be the parents of ASOUE central characters, that the Beast is ANYTHING to do with the bloody sugar bowl - should, I think, be ignored, and robustly so.
It would on the whole I think defeat these novels' points to be too cosily referential to the previous series. The answer to that series after all was that answers don't exist, only new questions, and that tenet doesn't seem to have changed much. We're in a new place, not the city, not the sea, way out somewhere, and we should look ahead.
So I'm going to try and love our new assemblage of Feints and Mallahans and so on for themselves now. And almost pretend we're in a related and parallel, but not identical reality to the last. VFD is barely even VFD anymore (and fires aren't currently central) - it's 'the organisation', or 'an unusual education'.
Other things, in no real order -
I love Theodora. I think her hair is sexy.
Moxie is prim and smug, I hope an octopus gets her.
Ms. Feint is impossible not to die for and very dangerous. Does her lair have no books because she's an amoral jazz-fiend, or because she's hiding them?
Little Lemony's reading taste is quite realistically young (which I find makes the references much harder). A nice paradox that ASOUE, theoretically targetted younger, has much more highbrow allusions etc.
All these missing/comatose fathers (and quite a few errant mothers). Freudian or something?
And I have to admit to total failure to spot that the butler had done it. Lemony's hint about birds and Hector's summary made me frown and re-read.
But it's a difficult one to react to. Lots of us have tried our hands at writing VFD prequel stories, and here comes along the real thing to show us where we went wrong and (less often) right.
This is in one way a bit like our various efforts in that the prose style is so radically different from the Lemony we knew before, Edward Gorey arch, slightly camp, melange of Gothic taste and New York wit suddenly going so delightfully hard boiled and unforgiving.
In every way...this is not what we expected. We played parlour games enlarging on the pasts of favourite minor characters, and trying out the VFD codes whose keys we'd been granted in the Unauthorised Autobiography and the later Baudelaire stories. In other words we pencilled in old stuff. But instead, this new book is almost entirely new territory.
The one really solid reference - Hector's bizarre little apparition at the end - even felt a bit wrong to me, after we'd been sedulously trained to give up on that sort of reassurance and enjoy, basically, a new scene/world/cast.
That's why a few theories here - that Theodora is to do with Olaf or a certain sinister and hairy villainess, that Stain'd might be near Mount Fraught, that bells=Sebald code (which I'd bet money we'll never see/hear again, these codes are jokes and that one has outstayed its welcome), that central characters might be the parents of ASOUE central characters, that the Beast is ANYTHING to do with the bloody sugar bowl - should, I think, be ignored, and robustly so.
It would on the whole I think defeat these novels' points to be too cosily referential to the previous series. The answer to that series after all was that answers don't exist, only new questions, and that tenet doesn't seem to have changed much. We're in a new place, not the city, not the sea, way out somewhere, and we should look ahead.
So I'm going to try and love our new assemblage of Feints and Mallahans and so on for themselves now. And almost pretend we're in a related and parallel, but not identical reality to the last. VFD is barely even VFD anymore (and fires aren't currently central) - it's 'the organisation', or 'an unusual education'.
Other things, in no real order -
I love Theodora. I think her hair is sexy.
Moxie is prim and smug, I hope an octopus gets her.
Ms. Feint is impossible not to die for and very dangerous. Does her lair have no books because she's an amoral jazz-fiend, or because she's hiding them?
Little Lemony's reading taste is quite realistically young (which I find makes the references much harder). A nice paradox that ASOUE, theoretically targetted younger, has much more highbrow allusions etc.
All these missing/comatose fathers (and quite a few errant mothers). Freudian or something?
And I have to admit to total failure to spot that the butler had done it. Lemony's hint about birds and Hector's summary made me frown and re-read.