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Post by Dante on Jun 27, 2009 8:24:17 GMT -5
Welcome to the increasingly-inaccurately-dubbed tenth week of the great 667 re-read of A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which we will reconsider the radical tenth book, first to be over three hundred pages long, The Slippery Slope. The traumatic tenth tome, longer than two of the three books which follow it, features a swarm of snow gnats, a gaggle of Snow Scouts, a troupe of villains, a pair of monsters, and a lone survivor of a suspicious fire. Discuss. |
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Post by Hermes on Jun 27, 2009 10:48:38 GMT -5
As Dante says, this book is long.
I find it a rather frustrating book, although there are a lot of good things in it, because it has as one of its themes how mysterious everything is, and so tends to make things more mysterious than they need to be. By doing this, of course, Handler is creating a stick for his own back. For instance, two of the major mysteries of the series - what does VFD stand for, and who is the survivor of the fire - are in fact answered in this book, but the characters aren't satisfied with the answers, and go on treating them as mysteries. There are other examples too.
This is also, I think, the first book in which all Sunny's utterances are meaningful - either in plain English or in code.
Chapter 1.
'he had managed to attract a girlfriend' - this rather suggests that O's relationship with E is quite new, which conflicts with what we found in TUA.
L has spent months searching for the caravan, again implying that he is writing quite some time after the events. This will become significant later. How exactly a rhyming dictionary helps him in his search is unclear.
Chapter 2.
'Violet wondered if they [the Quagmires] .... had managed to contact a secret organisation they had discovered.' This is an example of what I mean. This book constantly makes the situation of the Quagmires more puzzling than it needs to be. They're in a self-sustaining hot air mobile home, the whole point of which is that it never comes down to earth, so how could they contact anyone? - and I don't think we'd been given any suggestion that they wanted to.
Chapter 3.
'The few witnesses to Olaf's journey have mostly died...' - does this refer to Olaf's companions, or are we to suppose that someone did see Olaf going by from outside? Again. L's description of how the traces of the journey have vanished implies that a long time has passed since the events.
' when I first joined Olaf's troupe I'd never even heard of the Snicket file.' Possibly this is because it hadn't been compiled then.
'I tried to explain [to the volunteers] that crime is very in right now...' - this implies E has had at least some contact with VFD.
'We have reason to believe that some of these files are at VFD headquarters.' In this passage there seem to be several files of incriminating evidence, while later - and I think earlier as well - everything seems to turn on one file. (In the later passage, I suppose, it might be meant only that the Snicket file is the vital one once the others have been destroyed.)
'Is there an in hotel near the headquarters?' - this implies E has not been to the HQ before; this doesn't in itself prove she wasn't in VFD, since it's not clear that all members went there.
'it's all for the greater good' - this passage is of course echoed in Harry Potter, though Dumbledore and Grindelwald had a slightly more complex idea of the greater good than Olaf.
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Post by Dante on Jun 27, 2009 11:44:01 GMT -5
I'll start on this tomorrow, but incidentally, some buyers of TCC were lucky enough to get a promo item - a foldable piece of card, or some such, with various words on it. Folded correctly, it would spell out the message, "Two will disappear and never be seen again." Or words to that effect; I don't have access to any images of it, and for that matter it's so rarely mentioned that I can barely remember the details of it. If anyone has a copy, it would be extremely helpful if you could scan it. At any rate, it's fairly obvious what it was referring to, but before and during TSS, what reactions might you have had to this clue?
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Post by Hermes on Jun 28, 2009 14:53:37 GMT -5
Chapter 4.
The question came up in another thread when false spring is - in late winter, shortly before real spring, or in early winter. In either case there are real-world analogies - Groundhog Day for one, Indian/St Martin's Summer for the other. If we accept the calendar's date for Jacques' death (which I'm not sure we should) then all these things are happening at the beginning of winter. Are there any clues elsewhere?
Were there ever really any bears in the mountains, or is this just a mistake for lions? Certainly Olaf in TCC thinks there are bears there.
Chapter 5.
'He [Bruce] has caused VFD enough trouble...' - this presumably refers to his letting Olaf get the reptiles. But how does 'the sweatered scout' know this? I suppose Jacques might have told him, though it wouldn't be the most obvious thing to mention. Note also (1) the sweatered scout refers to VFD as 'we' - this is interesting, though in the light of later developments I don't think it means quite as much as you might think (2) this implies B himself is not in VFD.
'The Vertical Flame Diversion.. was once one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world.' It seems this was quite a while ago, since we're told the passageway has not been used for many years - if the submarine to which the pole was moved is the Queequeg, this has certainly been in use for a long time, sixteen years at least. It looks as though the Mortmain Mountains HQ ceased quite a while ago to be the hub of activity it once was.
If the bit about questions relates to the Vernacularly Fastened Door, as it seems to, it's a bit odd - you need to answer these questions to get out of the passage, not into it.
Ah, the letter to Kit. Two problems here. First, as we have seen, there's evidence L is writing some time after the events; but in this case K should be dead, and the Hotel Denouement should have been destroyed. L may possibly not know the first, but it's hard to see how he could not know the second. Out of story, the answer is simple - Handler had not yet decided to kill Kit or to destroy the hotel. (Note that the BBRE notes also seem to refer to the hotel as still standing.) In story it's harder. Might the 'Hotel Denouement' actually refer to the underwater library? But then what does the bit about ugly curtains mean? Or might there be a new Hotel Denouement on a new site?
Secondly, the sugar bowl. This passage seems to say that the SB contains the evidence that wil clear Lemony. It's well-known that this does not fit well with what happens in later books, where the SB becomes something of massive significance for the whole of VFD. But it doesn't fit that well with what happens in earlier books either. From TUA we know that sugar bowls are regularly used by VFD for some mysterious purpose. From THH we know that L stole the sugar bowl from Esme a long time ago, apparently when he and Beatrice were still together. Yet here he seems to be realising the significance of the SB for the first time.
I can think of a few solutions, none of them perfect, but here's my favourite: he doesn't say a sugar bowl is a good place to hide something; he says a tea set is a good place to hide something. Where do you hide a leaf? In the forest. Where do you hide a pebble? On the beach. Where do you hide a sugar bowl? In a tea set. The sugar bowl is itself the crucial evidence in some way, and L has worked out where it is hidden.
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Post by Dante on Jun 28, 2009 15:57:05 GMT -5
Were there ever really any bears in the mountains, or is this just a mistake for lions? Certainly Olaf in TCC thinks there are bears there. I can only find a reference in TCC to Klaus assuming that there are bears in the Mortmain Mountains, judging from the hibernation grounds. The bears themselves are an allusion to The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily, Handler's favourite children's book; whether they actually existed or whether Bruce is getting confused with a children's book or just getting confused in general, I don't know. Well, Bruce as a volunteer wouldn't make a great deal of sense. He doesn't fit the mould in the same way that Mr. Poe doesn't. And yet, you need to know the answers to get into the headquarters. Only a well-read person has the right to enter. This strikes me as a clever answer, but I'm not convinced that it goes any way towards explaining why the sugar bowl is of such significance to everyone. It mainly seems to be a reworking - in the opposite direction to, say, "the sugar bowl contains an audio tape," which just transfers the properties onto another McGuffin (and would prompt a search for a tape player). I intend to start my own reread on Monday. |
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Post by Sora on Jun 29, 2009 1:55:15 GMT -5
This is in fact my favourite volume of the series, and despite its flagrant contradictions with books both before and after it, I felt it the most revealing and significant. I find it a rather frustrating book, although there are a lot of good things in it, because it has as one of its themes how mysterious everything is, and so tends to make things more mysterious than they need to be. By doing this, of course, Handler is creating a stick for his own back. For instance, two of the major mysteries of the series - what does VFD stand for, and who is the survivor of the fire - are in fact answered in this book, but the characters aren't satisfied with the answers, and go on treating them as mysteries. There are other examples too. They are answered only in a superficial sense - we all conceived from perhaps even the first utterance of VFD in TAA that it could stand for Volunteer Fire Department, and its natural that Quigley would draw similar comparisons to the real institution and the fictional organization. Yet what I feel this book really revealed in the 'answers' to these mysteries is that there are no concrete answers - that in fact the Baudelaires really never meant to know 'everything' for any critical reason. As later books prove- the truth of VFD, the sugar bowl, JS, and every other mystery are irrelevant, because in the end all the Baudelaires have is themselves, regardless of the web of lies and secrets around them. Often I feel Lemony speaks out of the perspective of the Baudelaires, and to them Esme and Olaf's relationship began only very recently. A rhyming dictionary helps pass the time with the bears. In hindsight, what this quote would suggest to me is that all the members of the troupe albeit Fernald, the powder faced women and Olaf himself perished at Hotel Denouement, but of course as you later point out - this contradicts how L. wants to contact Kit at said Hotel....... |
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Post by Dante on Jun 29, 2009 6:42:24 GMT -5
For Beatrice – / When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely. / Now, I am pretty lonely. Since we now know that Lemony and Beatrice first met at a very young age, has Lemony really been so lonely all his life, even with two siblings?
The “frontispiece” here is one of Helquist’s best pieces of artwork – it’s a good action shot, shows the Baudelaires in motion rather than standing around looking morose as is usually the case. For some reason, Helquist didn’t seem to have the knack when doing, say, the Disappearance! cover for TWW, which almost didn’t look like his art at all. And of course this illustration raises a continuity problem that I’ll return to in a second.
~Chapter One~
“The Road Less Traveled” – suggest that Lemony is acquainted with the poet Robert Frost, and yet the poem is actually called “The Road Not Taken.” The former is, apparently, often mistaken for the title, but one might also say that “Less Travelled” implies a wider viewpoint than the personal one inherent in “Not Taken.” Lemony’s recollection of the poem doesn’t actually bear much resemblance to the poem itself. Is this significant, do you think?
One thing to note: TSS is something of a detour on the Baudelaires’ journey, as according to TCC they’ve actually travelled up from the direction of the Stricken Stream, and in TGG will go back down the Stricken Stream and by the Hinterlands once more.
Olaf’s schemes are described as “mean-spirited and particularly complicated,” which strikes me as a comment on the unnecessarily cruel and convoluted means that we’ve sometimes found he’s used in the past few books.
I must admit, “nevertheless he had managed to attract a girlfriend,” while on its own not a statement rooted in any particular time, is implied to be a recent event by the fact that it’s juxtaposed right against the part about Olaf’s plans. It must be said, of course, that we haven’t had any inkling of a girlfriend’s existence in the books before TEE, and in TBB Olaf acts as though he’s “on the market,” as it were.
Here’s a good example of why you don’t need to worry too much about descriptions of events from previous books: Count Olaf… had seen through their ruse, a phrase which here means “realized who they really were, and cut the knot attaching the caravan to the car…” Of course, in TCC Count Olaf hadn’t realised who they were – he was told by Olivia – and he didn’t personally cut the knot. It’s just a summary. It doesn’t need to be entirely accurate. End of TEE: Olaf gets a girlfriend. End of TCC: Olaf identifies the Baudelaires and cuts the rope.
In moments, the two Baudelaires wriggled out of the oversized clothing they had taken from Count Olaf’s disguise kit and were standing in regular clothes – now of course, Violet should still be in her hospital gown, as she was when she shed her disguise in TCC. Maybe Handler forgot. Maybe he deliberately overlooked this, as there wasn’t going to be any time soon when Violet could conveniently change clothes, and her wandering about the mountains freezing was unnecessarily problematic. Bit of both, probably.
The list of things in the caravan pantry seem to be an opportunity for Handler to show off some knowledge about foods; one is tempted, perhaps, to wonder if he’d recently taken an interest in cooking himself, but it sets the stage for Sunny’s dabbling in cookery in that there are no expert recipes manifesting out of nowhere. Well, not quite.
At the end of TCC, the caravan window was pointing uphill, towards Olaf’s car – but now there seems to be a door at that end, with the window at the end heading downhill. I wonder if this is a mistake, or just the vagueries of description.
Despite Violet’s claim that the Devil’s Tongue hasn’t brought them much luck, it’s worked perfectly every time she’s tried it, and in fact she’ll use it again in TPP, her own Sumac knot thoroughly forgotten. Mistake, deliberate oversight?
“Violet, before we try your invention, I want to tell you something.” Presumably just brotherly words of affection – a reaction to the old cliché of “In case we never see each other again.”
It strikes me that the Baudelaires might have been better off trying to tip the caravan onto its side – less rolling, more resistance. Less control, though.
That the Mortmain Mountains are made up of square peaks must be an allusion to something, or a joke of some kind? Or perhaps it’s just to enable Mount Fraught to have easy compass points.
The Stricken Stream is an “odd grayish black color, and moved slowly and lazily downhill like a river of spilled oil” – fairly clearly setting up the fact that it’s been massively polluted with ashes. However, since this is aSoUE, it could just be a feature of the world, so we’d probably overlook it on a first reading. It’s not like there’s any secret behind the Grim River’s high mud content.
That the caravan is never found by Lemony is setting up all the unanswered and unanswerable questions later on. If some of Lemony’s questions will never be answered, some of ours certainly won’t be. This reminds me of how crashed planes in the mountains are often very difficult or impossible to locate, although those fragments would probably be spread over a larger area.
The callback to Prufrock Prep. near the end of Chapter One is probably to remind us of the Quagmires, and indeed of Carmelita Spats.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 29, 2009 7:48:34 GMT -5
I can only find a reference in TCC to Klaus assuming that there are bears in the Mortmain Mountains, judging from the hibernation grounds. Sorry, yes, it's Klaus, not Olaf. But I take it the hibernation grounds do indeed mean that there are bears there. Do lions hibernate? I think the question whether he is a member is later raised - in a general spirit of creating mysteries. Oh, certainly, I was more concerned with reconciling it with the earlier passages. I don't think it's inconsistent with the later passages which make the SB massively important - it may contain something of immense value to VFD, and also be evidence agaisnt Olaf, perhaps just because of where it is, or because it has been marked in some way. But certainly it doesn't explain anything. Yet what I feel this book really revealed in the 'answers' to these mysteries is that there are no concrete answers - that in fact the Baudelaires really never meant to know 'everything' for any critical reason. As later books prove- the truth of VFD, the sugar bowl, JS, and every other mystery are irrelevant, because in the end all the Baudelaires have is themselves, regardless of the web of lies and secrets around them. I'd go along with much of this. I think it's clear that at this point Handler is beginning to develop the theme of mystery for its own sake. A lot of people were looking for a story which would answer all the puzzles - and when they didn't get one, felt that Handler had failed. But in fact it seems to me a that a story which solved everything would almost certainly have been unsatisfying, and would have left us saying 'Is that all?'. So to a large extent he decided to leave us with the mystery, and indeed to create new mysteries (most obviously the sugar bowl) in order to emphasise how mysterious the world is. A lot of the mysteries we had from earlier on - what is VFD, who is Beatrice, who is the survivor of the fire - are solved, but the solutions turn out not to be the point. “Violet, before we try your invention, I want to tell you something.” Presumably just brotherly words of affection – a reaction to the old cliché of “In case we never see each other again.” I think this is taken up later - K admits he didn't actually know what he meant to say. |
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Post by beatrice123 on Jun 29, 2009 8:40:57 GMT -5
I think this'll be a great book
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Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2009 12:57:02 GMT -5
I agree, beatrice123!!!
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Post by Hermes on Jun 29, 2009 14:00:34 GMT -5
Chapter 6.
The bit about the salad, I believe, was once thought to be a clue that L's sister was the Baudelaires' mother. This seems improbable to me, even without the later evidence that proves it wrong - it would mean that Jacques was their uncle, for instance, making it odd that they had never heard of him. Presumably Kit gave Beatrice the idea for the salad.
When reading TCC we saw that a lot of O's associates are freakish in some way, and this may help him in recruiting them; I wondered at the time if this applied to the white-faced women as well, but concluded it couldn't, as they chose their own freakish feature. Here it's made clear that they do see having a white face as a problem even though they make it white themselves - absurd though this is.
Presumably E stole the snowsuit from Beatrice - but one wonders when.
L went to Thailand to interview a taxi driver. This shows how thorough his research is. I wonder which taxi driver it was.
The reference to sugar is interesting, but nothing particular seems to turn on it.
'even I, after all this time, can feel their aura of menace so strongly...' - another piece of evidence that the events took place some time ago.
The MWBBNH and the WWHBNB have not seen O for some time; nevertheless they clearly know E. (Fernald, on the other hand, seems not to recognise them, unless he was so busy fishing that he never saw them.)
The 'infant servant' passage was once useful in attempting to date the schism. It clearly shows that it did not happen last year, as some lines in TUA suggest; but it is compatible either with the idea that it happened some fifteen years ago, or with the earlier dating found in TPP. At any rate, it seems likely that the menacing figures were involved in the original schism; we're moving away from the idea that O caused it all by himself.
Here we have the figurine themefor the last time, I think. I wonder if the figurine did in fact survive. My sense is that some people who were at the carnival managed to get away, so the souvenir-seller may have escaped.
The Snicket file is described as 'the only file that could put us all in jail' - as I mentioned ealier, this makes most sense if it's read as 'the only surviving file', the others having been destroyed in the burning of the headquarters. Even then it doesn't make that much sense. In any case, the woman is clearly wrong; she does not know about the underwater library.
Chapter 7.
The phrases used to operate the VFDoor change every season - though going by what was said earlier, they are always on the same broad themes. One wonders how the scout knows this season's questions (which would hardly be in Dr Montgomery's book); I suppose Jacques may have told him, but again it's not clear why.
' a persicope, or perhaps a spyglass..' - a nod to the movie?
'a sheer white wall' - this, and the illustrations, suggest the waterfall was almost vertical, but it can't really have been if it was possible to go up and down it by toboggan.
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Post by Dante on Jun 29, 2009 15:03:14 GMT -5
The bit about the salad, I believe, was once thought to be a clue that L's sister was the Baudelaires' mother. This seems improbable to me, even without the later evidence that proves it wrong - it would mean that Jacques was their uncle, for instance, making it odd that they had never heard of him. Presumably Kit gave Beatrice the idea for the salad. Or vice-versa. But yes, K. was considered another contender for Baudelaire mother - although more for the fact that there were hints that the Baudelaire mother wasn't Beatrice than that there was much evidence in Kit's favour. Of course, as we learn later, they did have problems in their past, about which I intend to talk at some length. Or which I'm interested in, at any rate. I'm sure someone's suggested an incident for this, but I can't for the life of me remember who or when. About fifteen years ago would be right for a child of around Sunny's age, an infant, to now be eighteen, which is as good an age for "all grown up" as any, I suggest. I think that the U.A. doesn't seriously mean to convey that the schism was extremely recent - that seems to be more an accident of an attempt to construct a consistent timeline for the U.A. When she mentions the schism in TCC, I get the feeling that Olivia's referring to something that happened a long time ago - which fits in with TPP's account. Yeah, it was the most minor of subplots, and I wonder what Handler was thinking of for it. Just a neat little series of background details for the observant, perhaps? At the end of TCC, Olaf or Esmé (I forget which) mention that they invited the owner of the souvenir caravan to join them, but she was too busy saving her figurines - suggesting that the crucial figurine did in fact survive. Oops, Olaf! Shame it wasn't submitted as the trial. Despite the fact that everyone and their dog seems to and should at least have heard of Dewey, indeed, the underwater catalogue seems to have remained relatively - but no, this is an issue for TPP. Depends. The movie wasn't released for more than a year after this. It depends at what stage in the production process the film was, and when the motif of the spyglass was introduced - Handler was fired after several drafts, but didn't that leaked original screenplay excerpt mention spyglasses? I can't find the wretched thing now. Oh wait, I saved a copy. Yeah, spyglasses are present in that. Artistic license - on both author and illustrator's part, I think. It sure seems like a frozen waterfall should be near-vertical, but then the plot wouldn't work. Take it as a moment of cartoonishness, perhaps? |
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Post by Hermes on Jun 30, 2009 11:38:23 GMT -5
Chapter 8.
At one time there was a debate about whether Quigley was lying, knew more than he was letting on, etc. If he is, clearly nothing comes of it; and some of the discrepancies in his story seem to be, in retrospect, the kind of discrepancies you might find in the work of an author who is constantly updating his ideas and not always checking for consistency. So I think there is no point in looking too closely into questions like 'When did the Quagmire fire happen?' and 'Why doesn't he mention hiding in a snowman?'. Q is what he appears to be - the point is that at first the Baudelaires thought he was a volunteer, part of the organisation, but he turns out to be someone like them, whose knowledge of VFD comes from diligent research and good luck - which means that if he can be a volunteer, so can they.
One thing that is confusing is that Q says his siblings' financial affiars were being handled by Esme - this doesn't seem to fit what happens earlier, where Mr Poe seemed ot be in charge of their affairs as well; and if Esme was their financial adviser, why did Olaf have to go to such lengths to kidnap them? (He went to lengths with the Baudelaires because Mr Poe refused to hand over the fortune.)
Q planned to go to Prufrock Prep, judging that 'it wasn't too far' - this doesn't fit the impression given by TAA (where Olaf has to smuggle the Quagmires back to the city by plane).
'How did the schism start? What was everybody fighting over?' This is one fairly important question which is indeed never answered.
I was wondering why, if Jacques was looking for the Baudelaires, he did not contact Mr Poe, and then it occurred to me that perhaps he did. Might Jacques be You-know-who? It makes sense that he would contact both Arthur and Eleanora, his former employer.
We are told that Duncan and Isadora are continuing their research - which I suppose they might be, as I guess they have Hector's books in the SSHAMH - and that they will realise that Q is alive and come looking for him - which seems most improbable, as there is no way they can get information from the outside world.
Chapter 9.
'If everyone who said that children shouldn't play with matches was an enemy of VFD, we wouldn't have a chance of survival.' Here Violet seems to refer to VFd as 'we'.
We're told the only way to the peak is to go back down the VFDiversion to the cave, and then follow the road up. Presumably, then, the road does not follow the stream all the way - if it did, it would have brought O to the headquarters. (This would also mean that if the stream had not been frozen, the VFDiversion would indeed be the only way to the headquarters. That's weird, when you think of it. How did the MWBBNH and the WWHBNB get there? How did the last volunteers to occupy it get there, given that the diversion hasn't been used for a long time? Perhaps in fact there's a path down, and Q's point is that that would take even longer than the diversion.)
The way in which C.M Kornbluth is made a member of VFD is indeed striking. In this case we cannot think of him simply as an honorary member, as Robert Frost, etc., might have been. We have had something similar before with Nabokov ('Mr Sirin') but there at least Handler used a pseudonym.
'I can imagine Mr Kornbluth turning from the window...., smiling at the Baudelaire inventor, and saying "Beatrice, come over here! Look at what this girl is making!"' If you read this carefully, it's clear that 'the Baudelaire inventor' is Violet. But how many people, at first glance, thought it was Beatrice?
How is Very Fresh Dill available on a frozen mountain, and how long can one expect it to stay Very Fresh?
'It's like we're members of VFD already.'
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Post by Dante on Jun 30, 2009 13:49:55 GMT -5
At one time there was a debate about whether Quigley was lying, knew more than he was letting on, etc. If he is, clearly nothing comes of it... I quite agree. The things he supposedly leaves out really have no bearing on the plot, and there are usually plenty of hints when someone isn't all they seem to be. He's just not portrayed as a bad person. However, I regard this as part of my reasoning for why the fire-survivor and Snicket File plotlines are broken. Strictly speaking, the Quagmire "situation" became Mr. Poe's responsibility when he was promoted to Vice President in Charge of Orphan Affairs. That's a very ambiguous phrase. However, I certainly think the Squalors, Jerome at least, would show a little more familiarity with the Quagmire name if this had been something Handler had thought of at the time. If Esmé was handling the Quagmire finances, she could just have handed the sapphires to him - or at least, the Quagmires might have needed to be kidnapped to give her an excuse to do so, but Olaf doesn't get a single sapphire. I really like the idea, but it just doesn't fit. I fancy the plane (and the associated puppy costumes) is more for humour than for realism, just as the geography of the series in general is more subject to what's best at any particular moment. Besides, I just recall Olaf putting the Quagmires on a plane - not necessarily one to the city. He might have been taking a convoluted route to cover his tracks. We get a few hints later. They contradict each other. The same question goes for that raised regarding the hypothetical Baudelaire parent survivor, or indeed any of the numerous people who seem to be searching for the Baudelaires, like Justice Strauss or Jerome (I guess the Baudelaires were on the run by the time Jerome got involved). I'm more interested in linking You-Know-Who to the loose ends in the BBRE; besides, the letter mentioning You-Know-Who in the U.A. implies that Arthur and Eleanora expect to hear from YKW fairly regularly, and that indeed an expected contact has not been met. This doesn't strike me as quite according with Jacques's quest. And yet they're able to send messages to the outside world. It almost seems as if they have some form of telegraph communication; perhaps they can link up to any they pass by? It doesn't seem beyond the bounds of possibility, to me. Hector may also have gathered stacks of newspapers archived in the V.F.D. library before the clearout - these could contain vital information. I think this is more the sense that V.F.D. is roughly aligned to the Baudelaires in the fact that they have the same enemies; any increase in the number of enemies of V.F.D. also acts as an increase in the number of dangerous people for the Baudelaires. Submarine would work - as would controlled eagles, which we know the sinister duo have. Strenuous hiking would do the trick - the Baudelaires and Quigley don't have the kit for it, but mountaineering togs can suffice for lack of clearly-marked paths. Possibly there were other secret passageways that would've been destroyed by the destruction of the headquarters - say, buried beneath. Quigley may not have all the facts, either. I think C.M. Kornbluth is probably a relatively obscure enough figure for Handler to get away with it - by which I mean that I would assume most readers of TSS, most natural readers, would not have heard of him. Thus it becomes more a covert introduction to more literature. Uh, not me, actually. The context is enough to unpick it without that sort of confusion, I think. "Baudelaire inventor" is the sort of term frequently applied to Violet, and not at all applied to Beatrice, and the passage itself follows on from one in which Violet is inventing, so you'd assume that the address to Beatrice was directed elsewhere unless you were reading the excerpt completely out-of-context. Well, it is frozen. And one may as well ask where V.F.D. sources any of their other foodstuffs. They're a secret organisation with rules for picnics, so they've probably got extremely finicky rules in place for the delivery of food. Amen to that! ~Chapter Two~ “or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor” – notice that this resembles the secret passageway from the Quagmire mansion as described by Quigley later. “the odd, rough sound of the stream’s fish as they stuck their heads out of the dark, thick waters of the stream” – again, part of a picture being built up across the book. “Violet wondered if they were safe and if they had managed to contact a secret organization they’d discovered.” You had a couple of problems with this, Hermes? I don’t see it as being beyond the bounds of possibility that the Quagmires and Hector could contact anyone from the SSHAMH, given that they do just that in TPP – they’re able to send a message (the one which calls Quigley away). Perhaps Hector managed to bring along a couple of carrier crows, for example. As for their choosing to contact V.F.D. – well, why not? By this time they know that everything to do with Olaf and Jacques Snicket links back to V.F.D. Trying to get the help of the organisation proper sounds like a good idea to me. Again we have a reminder of the existence of Carmelita Spats, and also of Quigley Quagmire. It’s been pointed out before that you can use the recaps in the early chapters of each book to figure out what’s going to happen later – this method was used by one of my old associates to successfully predict the appearance of Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor in TPP based just on the freely-released Chapter One (although since it was released online on the same day the book was published, we didn’t have that much warning). Same goes for the appearance of the Great Unknown in The End. Klaus should be giving us ideas here for why the Stricken Stream has changed in nature. In retrospect, it’s not hard to guess that the headquarters has already been burned down, but of course it’s hard to anticipate the interference of two entirely new characters. The British edition of TSS has an image of Violet wearing the poncho on the front cover, and the back has a small icon of both poncho and sweater. Violet looks alright because she’s in action shots and has to look cool, but Klaus does look fairly silly. Actually, that same cover practices one of Helquist’s usual techniques – obscuring most of a non-Baudelaire character who appears. We can just see Quigley’s arm. “It is a question I asked once, a very long time ago and in a very timid voice, and a woman replied by quickly putting a motorcycle helmet on her head and wrapping her body in a red silk cape.” Presumably this was on the mountain-climbing expedition of long ago. Was the woman anyone special? The motorcycle helmet reminds us of Esmé’s disguise in TVV, but the red is the same colour as the B snowsuit, so the two may have been a combo outfit. The snow gnats act like typical cartoon swarms of insects. They also seem like an angry commentary on stinging insects in general – notice how Klaus claims that it’s “scarcely ever true” that not bothering stinging insects will lead to them not bothering you. Lemony’s usual means of foreshadowing appears here, if by “foreshadowing” you mean “great big spoilers” – “on their way back down the mountain, after they had been reunited with their baby sister and learned the secret of Verbal Fridge Dialogue.” Well, it’s not really a spoiler. We know they’ll be reunited with Sunny because that’s how stories work. It’s a fair bet that they’ll end up going back down, as the rest of the series isn’t going to take place on top of a mountain. And we don’t even know what Verbal Fridge Dialogue is, although we can of course take a good guess. “Hey you cakesniffers!” And indeed Carmelita was mentioned just a little while earlier in the chapter. ~Chapter Three~ Notice that TSS employs the same simultaneous structure as is present in three chapters of TPP, but doesn’t play with it – because in TPP the simultaneous nature matters, and the three chapters parallel each other. Not so here. I think that “so many blizzards and avalanches have occurred in the Mortmain Mountains that even the road itself has largely disappeared” is a greater indicator of the long time since that this passage is apparently written, even if this does contradict the immediacy of the letter to Kit. This only makes me increasingly determined to ignore the contradictions. Just pick one alternative and go with it. None of them work. “The few witnesses to Olaf’s journey have mostly died under mysterious circumstances, or were too frightened to answer the letters, telegrams, and greeting cards I sent them requesting an interview.” I don’t think this refers just to troupe members – there could be other hikers or woodsmen in the mountains who we just don’t meet up with. It’s a mountain range. We wouldn’t expect to see everyone there. “certain animals of the Mortmain Mountains have returned to their posts and are rebuilding their nests” – i.e., at some point since this, the eagles have returned to their stations and are, perhaps, doing noble work once more. I really like how pointlessly cruel and ridiculous the sequence with Sunny in the car is – pinching her to get her to stop crying, not understanding when she says “No pinch”… I also like the phrase “trapped her on Esmé’s lap.” Of course, this could only be any kind of trap for someone of Sunny’s size. I also have to say that I really enjoy seeing the troupe’s perspective on things – for example, the hook-handed man talking about how the Quagmires complained all the time. Not only for the suggestion that they were being somehow unreasonable, but for the fact that it’s another angle on the Quagmires’ character, “whiny” rather than “traumatised.” I also like how the white-faced women seem more equal to Olaf here, to be able to say “Don’t blame yourself… Everybody makes mistakes.” It reminds me of TBB. I think the troupe is most interesting when they’re somewhat equal, rather than being reduced to the status of Olaf’s slaves. The freaks needing a recap excuses yet another recap – one of the things that pads TSS so much. There’s a lot we need to remember. As Hermes pointed out, the Snicket File wouldn’t have been written at the time the white-faced women joined Olaf’s troupe – it shouldn’t have been written, at least not in its final form, until after the Baudelaire and Quagmires fires, and the white-faced women have probably been in Olaf’s troupe for many years. I see that there’s no implication that the standard troupe members don’t know what V.F.D. is – fortunately, since of course the hook-handed man must know, or one of TGG’s major plot points wouldn’t make any sense. It’s understandable, though, that Olaf’s troupe would have seen enough of the action to at least put the pieces together, or to have needed to know for context. “Is there an in hotel near the headquarters?” This seems like a particularly ditzy question from Esmé, but it does feel like a sneaky bit of foreshadowing about the Hotel Denouement. Pages 56-57, yet more recapping. Like I said, TSS is longer than two of the three following books. It’s second-longest in the series. Part of that may be in all the recapping, but in practice that just takes up a couple of pages here or there. There’s also the fact that the Baudelaires go a lot of new places, meet a lot of new characters, there’s a lot of action. There’s no shortage of plot in TSS, whereas the plot is more skeletal in other books. It’s partly because there are people around the Baudelaires – it’s not just the Baudelaires sitting there and Handler having to say, “Oh then they did this for hours, they did that for hours.” The hook-handed man mentioning that he usually keeps a deck of cards, which is handy for TGG – or even, I’ll give Handler credit, he took this offhand comment and developed it. How a large rock can be used to pass the time, though, I’m not sure. Maybe he sharpens his hooks on it. For some reason, the eponymous slippery slope is described by Sunny as if it stems from an entirely different mountain, and not Mount Fraught, which is where Olaf and his troupe are setting up camp. It’s described as a “glittering white strip” “extending from the highest peak in the Mortmain Mountains,” and we get another “cascaded down from the highest peak” – using this terminology seems to imply it’s not coming down from the mountain Sunny’s on, and yet we know it is (since the mountaintop was itself described as the highest peak a couple of pages before). The fact that she can see it as a glittering white strip also indicates that she’s looking at it from far away – if it came from just beneath her feet, she’d only get a very squashed view of it, if any. It’s quite odd. White-faced women, hook-handed man, freaks – that’s six people to one other tent. I guess that with this arrangement, at least, Olaf and Esmé are comfy. The series doesn’t shy away from the fact that Olaf and Esmé are sleeping together, whereas it seems to me that other children’s series might be a bit squeamish about it. “I hear that babies can creep up and steal your breath while you’re sleeping.” Of course, in the scenes with the troupe in TSS, they are also presented as being incredibly silly rather than serious. And a bit more recapping, in case you hadn’t had enough. |
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Post by Hermes on Jun 30, 2009 15:02:23 GMT -5
Strictly speaking, the Quagmire "situation" became Mr. Poe's responsibility when he was promoted to Vice President in Charge of Orphan Affairs. That's a very ambiguous phrase. It does at least imply, though, that the Quagmires are clients of Muctuary Money Management, and I never got the sense that Esme worked for them. . OK, no actual inconsistency, then. Nevertheless, I feel there's a change of emphasis. The sense I got at the end of TVV was that the Quagmires had escaped, and were now in a safe place; the continued suspense concerned whether the Baudelaires would ever be able to join them. Now, the Quagmires are being written back into the story, with the apparent aim of giving them more adventures. I think at this point Handler probably did intend to bring them back. I'm still worried by how it stays Very Fresh - this method will only work if the person for whom the message is intended arrives just after it is left. (This raises the puzzle, of which more in due course, of when the message was left. The MWBBNH and the WWHBNB say it took them a month to burn the HQ, and the volunteers had gone before they arrived. But there are reason for thinking the message was left much later than that.) Well, my view still is that the 'long after' theory is supported by everything Lemony says; the 'just behind' theory comes from trying to reconcile different books. There's nothing in the letter to Kit itself which implies L is writing just after the events; it's just that we know, from later books, that Kit is dead. TBL may be relevant here. Well, we've already been told that Mount Fraught is the highest peak - and at the end of the paragraph it says that the SS 'disappeared into the darkness below'. But it is odd. Perhaps it was first written for another setting? Chapter 10. This is of course the most romantic chapter in the series. The question is raised whether Isadora and Duncan were in VFD. It would certainly be odd if they were and Quigley was not. I think the answer is 'no', or at least not in the way V and Q mean - but this must wait for the next chapter. 'We searched for days and days and couldn't find the sugar bowl.' This is the first (explicit) mention in this book of the SB (the letter to Kit didn't actually say 'sugar bowl', just 'tea set'.) I think Dante once mentioned a theory that there are actually several sugar bowls, and so far that seems quite plausible; we know VFD uses sugar bowls for some purpose; it would make sense for the MWBBNH and WWHBNB to want to find the sugar bowl kept at the headquarters, which would be different from the sugar bowl stolen by Lemony from Esme. But subsequent events do not bear this out. |
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