Following a rational plan, I am
listening to the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events in the order
they were released, and I am pleased to report that this third book in the
series is my favorite so far. In this
story, the orphaned children find themselves with their Aunt Josephine. What I especially like is the terrible truth
that the children are not only at the mercy of the conniving Count Olaf, but also
of their guardians. Mr. Poe the banker
is well meaning but he does not take the children seriously; he dismisses their
paranoia about Count Olaf even though their fears are perfectly well justified,
and they are far more observant than he is. 

But it is
their Aunt Josephine who demands the more subtle moral evaluation. She has agreed to be the legal guardian of
the children, and in some ways she tries her best to fulfill her
responsibilities, but she is a coward. 
She is so cowardly that she is scared to answer the telephone in case
she is electrocuted. She serves them cold cucumber soup on chilly wintry days
because she is scared to use the oven. 
Her life is full of fear, and her timidity makes her unfit to be the
children’s guardian. Maybe what is most
exasperating about Aunt Josephine is that she does not see how her limitations
hurt the children, and at the same time, she insists on correcting their
grammatical mistakes even when they are facing far more pressing concerns. In a sense, Aunt Josephine is like many
parents: while well meaning, she is unable to protect her charges from danger,
and she is too concerned with her own fears to be of any practical help when
trouble comes.

There are
points in this story when one would expect Violet, Klaus and Sunny to lose all
patience with their aunt; there comes a point when they could ensure their own
safety by sacrificing the life of their aunt, and one wonders whether this
option even crossed their mind. Even
though they are good children, one also wonders whether they could have ever
come to love their Aunt Josephine had they ended up spending the rest of their
childhoods with her, if she had not suffered such a terrible death. The woman
certainly is not very lovable, and it might take a saint to overlook her many
faults, even though she means well.

This
question, how we can love people whose lives are crippled by their own
weaknesses, may extend even further for the orphans. One issue so far only hinted at in these stories is what caused
the family house to burn down, although there is one large hint that Count Olaf
was behind the crime. It seems that children may have to ask themselves at some
point why their parents did not protect themselves better against their evil
relative, and why they didn’t make better provisions for the welfare of their
children in the event that they, the parents, died unexpectedly. Already one wonders why on earth they
thought it reasonable to leave the welfare of children in the hands of the
ineffectual Mr. Poe.

In short,
author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) deals with the same kind of
questions that anyone who has been let down by their parents has to face, and
that probably includes most of us. One
wonders at the good manners of the children, and I for one am curious whether
they will ever display some anger at their guardians. Anyone with a psychological frame of mind must surely suspect
that the poor Baudelaire children are at some level be angry and resentful that
they have not been better protected.

The story
of The Wide Window contains the usual high level of adventure, and the
tale is told with the usual love of language that characterizes this
series. The ending is particularly
wonderful. The unabridged
audiobook is read by the author instead of Tim Curry who read the first
two audiobooks in the series. I sorely missed
Curry’s theatrical reading, but Mr. Snicket does a satisfactory job.

Links:

§        
 RealAudio excerpt
from The Wide Window.

§        
Review of The
Reptile Room.

§        
Review of The
Bad Beginning.

§        
 Lemony
Snicket web site.

©
2002 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Christian Perring, Ph.D.,
is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is
editor of Metapsychology Online Review. His main research is on
philosophical issues in psychiatry. He is especially interested in exploring
how philosophers can play a greater role in public life, and he is keen to help
foster communication between philosophers, mental health professionals, and the
general public.

Categories: Fiction