Nov. 17, 2005

‘The Penultimate Peril’ is actually quite a charming romp

By JEFF COTRELL
cotrellj@marietta.edu
Some weeks, I would venture, should never be attempted. Don't even try to make it through them. Last week, for me, was one such week. Plans went awry, attempted transactions at reputable financial institutions failed due to incorrect adding of numbers, floppy disks containing an entire night's worth of work proved to be corrupted, prompting a certain professor to accuse yours truly of engaging in unhygienic practices with said disk which caused said corruption, and girls (as usual) seemed to be wearing special glasses that made me invisible to them.

On Thursday evening, at about 11:00, I sought a respite from this turmoil. I had spent the previous night scrambling madly to finish a project that I had put off until the last minute, simply because I had another large project due in another class on Tuesday. So after downing an energy drink and snatching two more on my way out the door, I had faced a (horrible) Thursday. Making it through the day with my sanity intact was accomplishment enough; abandon all hopes of salvaging my dignity. I did my best, though. I read a book…for pleasure, not for class.

Did I select a cheerful, sunny pleasure read to elevate me out of my despair and woe? Nay, dear reader, I did not. I picked up The Penultimate Peril, book 12 in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. The book had just been released on Tuesday, but I had been unable to read it (see paragraph 2, above). So instead of perusing a volume intended to bring happiness, I read a book which openly advised me to “put this next-to-last book down” and find something else to read.

The book really was charming, in a macabre fashion. What interested me most was the way in which Snicket set up a strict dichotomy in the first several books, then deconstructed that dichotomy in this penultimate installment in his series. Throughout the early and middle books of the series, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were definitely heroic, noble, and otherwise insufferably pleasant in the face of their own dreadful circumstances, while greedy Count Olaf was perpetually self-indulgent, vicious, and melodramatic. But in the last few books, the line between hero and villain has blurred considerably. This comes to full fruition in The Penultimate Peril, where absolutely no one in the book remains free from troubling yin-yang-like dualism.
Almost immediately, Snicket establishes this motif. The Baudelaires work as concierges in the Hotel Denouement, where members (both good and evil) of V.F.D. are gathering. But there's no sure way of telling the villains from the true volunteers except observation, and matters become complicated when everyone in V.F.D. uses coded language and disguises. Furthermore, the Baudelaires main contact in the Hotel is Frank, who is supposedly a true volunteer; unfortunately, Frank has an identical brother, Ernest, who is thoroughly evil.

The Baudelaires never see more than one at a time until the very end of the book, and they can never determine which one they are talking to-they cannot tell the villain from the hero. Neither man does anything to indicate his moral status; even when the two brothers are together, they act exactly alike.
The Baudelaires, too, enact several villainous deeds throughout the course of the book. To prevent spoilers, I won't enumerate which of their acts is villainous (because, in typical Snicket fashion, the book makes us believe we know more about the characters than they do about themselves), but I will say that the Baudelaires cite the same reason for their villainous deeds as the Nazis did for theirs: just following orders. To be sure, the Baudelaires never intentionally cause harm, and they always have the purest of motives and the best of intentions. To contrast with the spots of darkness in the Baudelaires' otherwise unsullied consciences, Count Olaf even has a moment when he recognizes his own villainy and recoils from it. But events take their course and force Olaf to ever more villainous deeds.

Indeed, the phrase, “What else could I do?” reverberates throughout the novel, with nearly every character plaintively asking others what other course of action would have been advisable. And this is Snicket's triumph, for at the novel's close, as in the last several books, he does not simply resolve the issue of heroism versus villainy, placing each character firmly in one camp or the other. He leaves that task to us. Violet tells us, “We had good reasons, but we still did bad things,” and Klaus echoes her with, “We want to be noble, but we've had to be treacherous.” Sunny attempts to absolve the trio by recalling the words of another character: “Noble enough,” meaning that one does not have to be entirely noble. One need only make a sincere attempt at nobility.
As the book ends, we still don't know, based on the face value of events, who is and who isn't “noble enough.” Even though Violet, Klaus, and Sunny willingly board a boat captained by Count Olaf, they do so with pure hearts, in order to escape from the Hotel, which they have set on fire, but only so that they could warn the rest of the members of V.F.D. that the last safe place is no longer safe. This sort of cycle abounds throughout the book, with these examples being only a representative sample of the ways in which the strict dichotomies of earlier books become blurred in The Penultimate Peril. In the end, Lemony Snicket has given us the same task that Kit gave to Violet, Klaus, and Sunny: to observe everyone, and make our own judgments.