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Post by Dante on Sept 15, 2015 2:39:57 GMT -5
The best thing Snicket's ever written. Unambiguously better than the novels it's most directly comparable to and absolutely a success as the final installment of a mystery series. By the way, don't quote this post unless you want to see the spoilers under the spoiler tags below; it's a flaw in the system. Most pressing thoughts so far. Full-sized full-novel danger spoiler things. : Looks like nobody will really be surprised on Hangfire's identity, or the function of the BB statue. Was startled at the notion that Hangfire seemingly intended to feed the kidnapped children to the Bombinating Beast, I was a fan of the theory he was trying to keep the innocent children out of harm's way.
I'm being summoned to bed now, but most pressing thought is:
Page 119, the carriage of the train nearest the engine is labelled as WDE. Shouldn't that be WPE, P for Pocket? Just to reiterate for any casual readers: Yes, massive, story-ruining spoilers under these tags. Well, Hangfire's identity had been a given for a while, with ?2 and ?3 having massive clues in this direction although it's worth noting that it wasn't obvious in ?1 itself; that book didn't give us any positive clues, though it was a reasonable way to line up the dots. I don't think I can say I'd called Hangfire planning to feed children bodily to a monster; I just thought he'd let their blood get sucked, but I'll claim some points from that. And I know of exactly one person who guessed the true function of the Bombinating Beast, so I think anyone who doesn't read theory threads on 667 will probably have been safe from that one, although I realised as of ?3 that it was almost certainly true, yes.
I noticed the WDE problem, too; rather odd. Maybe someone was just writing messily owing to the jolting of the train. Edit: Oh yes, food for thought for anyone who gets the U.K. edition: The back cover of the Egmont edition samples numerous illustrations from the front cover of LB's American edition. (The ones it doesn't are rather shocking.) The back cover of the eventual LB edition will look quite different, so we probably still have a few new illustrations to look forward to.
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Post by flushbribe on Sept 15, 2015 3:26:22 GMT -5
Well, this is great, the reason I decided to get back into UE forum-ing. Love to pick your thoughts on some of the big stuff, Dante. Again, spoilers. Like you say, such a great ending to a mystery series. I was punching the air at the return of Dame Sally Murphy, as I'd always been a bit annoyed at how she just disappeared after her reveal in ?1.
I was really impressed with the level of resolution, even to questions I didn't really know I wanted to ask. I'd thrown away Walleye, Pocket (or Docket, for illustration purposes...) and Eratosthenes as VFD codenames and there was more air-punching upon their arrival...
But, to me, the biggest shock of all (if we can forgive him for spoiling the ending of To Kill A Mockingbird) is Snicket killing Hangfire. I suppose I'd always suspected maybe Hangfire wasn't quite as villainous as we were being lead to believe... but it's still an interesting musing on justice, isn't it? The thought that you need cruelty and chaos to triumph over cruelty and chaos seems like the logic of the 'fighting fire with fire' side of the schism... but I suppose that's one of the core transferable themes between ATWQ and ASOUE.
And although the waxy paper at the bottom of the statue had always made it clear to me the statue was meant to be 'played', I didn't expect a full-on screaming appearance from the BB. I'd thought it was the stuff of legends, like a couple of octopi in the fire pool... and, no surprises, much punching of the air from me when it came bombinating to life.
Coming into the series, it felt like the Bombinating Beast was going to lead into an origin story for The Great Unknown. How do you feel about that now? I don't think it quite fits my personal interpretation of the original series that the 'question mark' is this mysterious (and hungry) creature...
Maybe I'm too close to it, but it seems like LS's best work. Or rather, it's success in my mind comes from ATWQ now being such a complete work, with the right amount of mystery left hanging... I'm sure those that are Fan Fiction inclined will be able to make something brilliant that begins at the end... And now... quite hard to describe how I feel. Happy, because it finished in a way that wasn't disappointing to me, but also a little melancholy that maybe that's the last Snicket novel of its ilk. I don't know whether the size-adjustments and sharp inflation of the RRP (once again, screw you Egmont!) is an indication that ATWQ hasn't sold brilliantly in the UK, but I can't imagine there'd be another series set in the ASOUE universe.
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Post by Cafe SalMONAlla on Sept 15, 2015 5:09:45 GMT -5
WTF.
Anyway, I have just made my order with Waterstones. It should arrive a whole THREE DAYS before the release date.
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Post by Dante on Sept 15, 2015 5:10:44 GMT -5
Well, this is great, the reason I decided to get back into UE forum-ing. Love to pick your thoughts on some of the big stuff, Dante. Again, spoilers. Like you say, such a great ending to a mystery series. I was punching the air at the return of Dame Sally Murphy, as I'd always been a bit annoyed at how she just disappeared after her reveal in ?1. She was mentioned again in File Under, which I think must have been a prompt to make sure we didn't forget that she existed, but she and Lizzie are kind of emblematic of how ?4 just wrapped everything up - everything that really mattered, anyway - and how carefully-constructed the series was. I also noticed, as one interesting point, that Ellington mentioned her at one point and seemed to think that she had drowned in the Sallis mansion basement, which indicates that Ellington must have known more than she ever let on about what was going on there. I... sort of expected there to be at least some nod to what the dedications were all about, but I didn't expect them to be that involved with the plot; I was totally floored when they showed up. Although I think the dedication to this book, ?4, pointing it to the Bellerophons was the big sign that there would be some development in that direction, and once it was explained who Walleye, Pocket, and Eratosthenes were, I called from there that Pip and Squeak would end up being librarians. Again, very clever construction, and once again the dedications, as in ASoUE, are directly relevant to the plot. ATWQ takes a lot more than I ever expected from ASoUE, and finds another way of doing it well. What I think is that... well, I don't know if you've noticed it, but the right question, at the start of the book? Is it more beastly to be a murderer, or to let one go free? Lemony still doesn't know; he had to experience both. But certainly I didn't see him going that far, and I think he probably didn't, either... But I think that at the heart of ATWQ, especially around Ellington, is the question of how far it's acceptable to go in pursuit of the right thing. It's a noir series; we grasp for morality and it escapes us. The solutions will never be wholly alright. And thirteen years old is a difficult age.
I think all of that is in there - and it's right in there in Lemony's conflict with V.F.D., too, about finding new ways to fix the world. The young characters, and Hangfire too, are all people who want to achieve some good end, to save something, protect something, avenge something, and in this world we live in then we simply don't know how to do it without going too far. This was right there in ASoUE, too - life will make you do terrible things or have terrible things done to you. The world is wrong, and in seeking a way to be at peace in it and to live in it then things will always go wrong for us, too. Wow, that's pretty bleak. I don't think it's meant to be quite that bleak, though. I think it's more simply that there is no perfect world, no way of doing things that will save everything and make everyone happy. We'll always be confused and we'll always struggle to make things right. And that's simply something we have to know and accept and prepare for if we don't want to get lost ourselves. I don't think any of us ever understood the waxy paper. I always assumed it was just a covering to prevent it from being used, and ?3 kind of strengthened that impression when I realised that it was shed skin, and therefore proof that whoever created the Bombinating Beast, the statue, was involved with the Bombinating Beast the animal. I absolutely thought it was going to appear, though, although I wasn't expecting something quite so... violent and alien as what we got. Think back to TRR, and it's clear that biology and fauna are all more extreme and outlandish than in the real world. So while things like Bombinating Beasts aren't common, then in terms of the rarest of rare... I thought it might really exist. I'm sure a lot of people will be tricked by the fake-out "explanation," though. I've always been opposed to the idea of the Great Unknown being explained. It's shaped like a question mark and has "unknown" in its name, and furthermore it's a gigantic metaphor for death. You can't go around explaining that, it'd be horrible. I definitely think ATWQ lines up that way for people who want it to - although at the same time, there are countless contradictions, like the implication that the Bombinating Beast is simply going to lurk in the thoroughly drained Clusterous Forest from now on rather than returning to the sea, as well as the fact that the Great Unknown doesn't bombinate. But I think that, in mythic terms, the two are related. The Bombinating Beast is also associated with death, after all, and very directly, though in a noir series that is perhaps a much less mysterious thing. I think that the Great Unknown's form is inspired by what people make of death, and legends about the Great Unknown probably filter into those of the Bombinating Beast. They're both a legend of death that stalks at the very edge of our world. Put it this way: As an ending, ?4 kills TPP and The End stone dead. It shows that the whole of ATWQ was brilliantly-constructed, with nearly everything and everyone playing a direct and important role in the mystery and the catastrophe. ASoUE is deliberately very very open-ended, which always made its choice of finales rather awkward, but ?4 takes some of the same themes and plays them straight and plays them well.
(?2 looks to have been fabulously retconned, though, from Hangfire wanting invisible ink to Hangfire wanting it never to have been created. Can't win 'em all.)
I do think, though, that ?4 is most directly a reprise of TPP, and a far superior one. So many of the same themes and ideas show up, so much of the same atmosphere. And if you're wondering how direct a revisiting it is, consider this: A sub-librarian is killed with a gun, and the person accused of the crime is very probably called Sunny... Heck, the murder weapon is even poison darts, of TPP infamy. The parallels are real and very definite. The book is TPP executed with completely different intent, but the same tools.
Speaking of the ending, though, stitching that together with the ASoUE chronology is going to be fun; I've been thinking about it, and see a few ways in which it could work, though, but the book definitely puts a whole new light on canon and on the character of Lemony. If I were writing an interquel myself, I think Ellington joining forces with Olaf to destroy Lemony is probably the direction I'd go in. That's the great tragedy of the series, of course: Lemony is the only one who ever liked or sympathised with or cared about Ellington, and she'll despise him forever. For me, it's much the same. Last night, when I finished, I did feel emotionally drained, as it's an emotional finale not just as a narrative but also as our farewell to ATWQ, and most likely to Lemony Snicket as a serial narrative author for at least a while. I don't think another series set in the ASoUE universe is out of the question, though some possibilities are obviously very much ruled out, though I wish the series could have had a more enthusiastic and public reception as it deserves it more than ASoUE did, in my opinion, and the Daniel Handler who could write ?4 should definitely write more. (Can we hope for an ATWQ Netflix series? I want that far more than the ASoUE one now.) But this is definitely it for a while. It went out on a high, but all the same, I feel like it will be a while before we can truly recover and look objectively at what the future might hold.
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Post by Esmé's meme is meh on Sept 15, 2015 8:25:15 GMT -5
All those spoilers... the temptation of opening them is so big.
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Post by Dante on Sept 15, 2015 8:39:32 GMT -5
Genuinely, though, please don't. It's an amazing read, but only in strictly chronological order. Trust me, it's worth the wait.
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Post by B. on Sept 15, 2015 10:30:04 GMT -5
I have my copy now! Featuring other Handler books and a pink bathrobe. I'm going to make a start on it right now, armed with tissues and some calculus and chemistry homework I'm supposed to do along the way. Also, I'm sure ATWQ could still gain significant popularity and success. There could well be a film or television series, and I'm sure Handler will write more. We probably just have a long time to wait- but I'm confident 667 will still be here when and if he does.
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Post by flushbribe on Sept 15, 2015 10:34:34 GMT -5
Imagine how lovely that would look with a full-size and properly coloured ?1. Also you've an interesting solution as to where to put 'Horseradish' - I always think it looks weird against the full ASOUE set as it reuses The End green.
Enjoy it, Bee! Would love to hear your thoughts as you make your way through.
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Post by B. on Sept 15, 2015 10:42:40 GMT -5
Imagine how lovely that would look with a full-size and properly coloured ?1. Also you've an interesting solution as to where to put 'Horseradish' - I always think it looks weird against the full ASOUE set as it reuses The End green. Enjoy it, Bee! Would love to hear your thoughts as you make your way through. Thanks! Horseradish used to just chill at the end of my shelf, but I've had to move it haphazardly to make room for the new book. ?1 doesn't really bother me. I like it's unique-ness. Edit: I could post an obnoxious live blog as I make my way though?
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Post by flushbribe on Sept 15, 2015 10:49:57 GMT -5
Sure, what are your thoughts on the octopus : bombinating beast ratio on the inside covers?
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Post by Agathological on Sept 15, 2015 11:38:38 GMT -5
It's decided.
I am going away for a while; the temptation to spoil is too great and I know I'll accidentally click on a spoiler tag; so I will depart and will return whence I have a copy. I hope all the questions will be answered! I hope there are more character illustrations!
Note: does anyone know If WHSmith has stocked it early? I could grab it from Waterstobes but I'd have to wait until Saturday.
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Post by flushbribe on Sept 15, 2015 11:39:41 GMT -5
The two WH Smith's I went to on my way to a Waterstone's yesterday did not have it.
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Post by Dante on Sept 15, 2015 13:07:37 GMT -5
Bee: Liveblog if you will! Nice set of books there. I've noticed this on my own shelf, but the purple spine box on ?4 really seems to leap out at you somehow; it disturbs me a little every time I look. Maybe I should take another picture of my own inordinately huge collection.
Agathological, I hereby ban you from this thread. Until you can find a Waterstones, that is.
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Post by Kit's tits kick ticks on Sept 15, 2015 13:35:03 GMT -5
Hopefully i can get a copy of this on saturday and i will probably do y usual liveblog/readalong thing then
hopefully
(mister m post)
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Post by B. on Sept 15, 2015 14:02:58 GMT -5
Oh my god. Oh my GOd. OH MY GOD. No spoilers here. So I'm at the beginning of Chapter 11 right now, and so much has happened already jfc, and I get the feeling there's even more to come (which I will of course read after I take a break to do maths). So many Easter eggs and references to asoue. Oh and yeah, the ratio of Octopi to beasts on the inside covers is interesting, and a nice touch in terms of design though; it's now basically the inverse of that in ?1. Although I did accidentally flip ahead and see some of the illustrations at the end oMG Bee: Liveblog if you will! Nice set of books there. I've noticed this on my own shelf, but the purple spine box on ?4 really seems to leap out at you somehow; it disturbs me a little every time I look. Maybe I should take another picture of my own inordinately huge collection. I should point out to those of you who don't currently have the book, that the actually colours on the spine and cover are actually a much deeper purple- photographs seem to make it come out my lilac-y [/shrug]. Don't take a picture of your collection Dante, you'll just put mine to shame.
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