‘The End’ is here; of course, it’s dismal

IF you’re among the millions of readers who’ve suffered through Lemony Snicket’s dreary series chronicling the ill-fated Baudelaire orphans and their miserably tragic lives, you may prefer kayaking with a spoon to reading this review.

The story we have to tell is far more dismal than the orphans’ relentless chase by an evil thespian. It is much more pathetic than eating a stick of gum for lunch. It is a lot more hopeless than tobogganing through a stream, evading killer leeches or getting out of the many outrageously tricky scenarios the Baudelaires have found themselves in since losing their parents to a fire. No, the story we have to tell is even more tragic than all the tragedies of the previous 12 books combined because Lemony Snicket’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events” is coming to its disastrously sad and gloomy end.

It is appropriate that “The End” should be released on such an inauspicious date as today, Friday the 13th. “The End” is the 13th, and final, book in the series, which has sold 50 million copies in 40 languages since 1999, when “The Bad Beginning” first left the Baudelaires homeless and on the run from Count Olaf, a decrepit actor with an ankle tattoo, a single eyebrow and an unwavering interest in the children’s enormous inheritance.

Subsequent books have seen the siblings shacked up with a herpetologist and a hypochondriac, in a penthouse and at a prep school, living among crows and with a carnival, and working at a hospital and a hotel, which brings us to the horrifying circumstances that make up the beginning of “The End”: Violet, the eldest of the Baudelaires, her brother Klaus and sister Sunny are literally stuck in the same boat with Count Olaf, drifting across the sea with no land in sight. There is nothing on board for the ever-resourceful Violet to concoct into an invention that would help them escape, nor are there books for the ever-studious Klaus to read and catalog in his notebook. The single jar of plain white beans on the boat is a culinary challenge even for Sunny, a toddler with an unusual talent for cooking.

As always with the Baudelaire orphans, bad goes to awful, then worse. The boat and its passengers are swept into a storm so violent and terrible that, Snicket writes, “I never wanted to speak of it again.” Of course he does -- for three pages -- in awesomely alliterative detail.

Defying the odds (so the siblings can endure even more torturous scenarios), the Baudelaires end up on an island populated with survivors of other storms. All the inhabitants are dressed in white robes woven from the fur of the island’s wild sheep, in an effort to color-coordinate with the white sand on the beach and the healing clay found farther inland. In addition to their matching outfits, everyone on the island is cultishly nice. After all the tumult in Book 12, “The Penultimate Peril,” the Baudelaires are relieved to be in such a peaceful, idyllic place, even if life on the island is as bland as the spiceless ceviche served for dinner each night.

Of course the last book in the series wouldn’t be unfortunate if Count Olaf didn’t wash ashore, which he does, brandishing a diver’s helmet filled with spores of the deadly Medusoid Mycelium fungus. But he isn’t the only evil soul on the island. The island’s leader, the white-robed Ishmael, has a few nefarious tricks up his sleeves as well. It turns out he knew the Baudelaires’ parents. They used to live on the island. And much of their mysterious story is told in an enormous handwritten book Ishmael has been hiding -- a book also called “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

That brings us to the beginning of the end of “The End.”

Lemony Snicket’s “The Beatrice Letters,” published last month with a shiny gold sticker on the cover saying it is “suspiciously linked to book the thirteenth,” offered tantalizing clues to the misfortunes that lie ahead in “The End.” “The Beatrice Letters” chronicles the correspondence between Snicket and Beatrice -- the person to whom all the books in this truly unfortunate series have been dedicated, and someone we’ve been led to believe is dead. An antiquarian-style poster accompanying the book depicts a shipwreck and a broken board bearing the name Beatrice. From these “letters,” we learn that her name is Beatrice Baudelaire. Could there be a fourth Baudelaire orphan?

That is one of many unanswered questions in the Baudelaires’ long, sad story. Were their parents as noble as the orphans believed them to be before they died in the fire at Briny Beach? Are their parents even dead? Will Count Olaf finally get his long, unkempt claws into the Baudelaire family fortune? Who is Lemony Snicket, and why is he telling the Baudelaires’ story anyway? Who is Beatrice?

Readers have cried a sea of tears in their attempts to piece together answers, devouring tomes that, by later volumes, got to be a bit bloated and meandering. That is to say, indulgent and longer than necessary. But throughout this final book, Daniel Handler, er Lemony Snicket, is in tip-top shape, a phrase that here means he’s delivered a fantastic story that is fast-paced and chock full of the author’s trademark linguistic digressions. With this gloriously preposterous tale, Snicket has let his imagination out on its longest leash, bringing readers along on one of his wildest rides yet.

We don’t want to spoil The Ending, but we will tell you this: You’re sure to be disappointed, in a good way.

susan.carpenter@latimes.com