The End. This entry will contain spoilers, although if you are looking for an actual plot summary you’ll have to go somewhere else.

I finished it this morning, after rereading the entire series, including two rereadings each of The Unauthorized Biography, The Beatrice Letters, and The Penultimate Peril. I was spoiled before I started reading it, and I kind of intended to hate it, but I did not. I liked it very much. I usually don’t like heavy-handed political messages, but this is a book for kids, really, and as young adult books go, this one is subtle enough. You’ve got your anti-sectarianism message, your warning against abistinence-only education, and your warning against stupidity in the name of dogma. (If there was ever any doubt that the message of this series is something along the lines of “knowledge is power,” that doubt was pretty much obliterated when the kids were saved by a snake handing them an apple.)

And a lot less is left unresolved than I was led to believe by the spoilers, but you might only get that if you have recently reread everything. By the time I finished The Slippery Slope, I was pretty sure both Baudelaire parents were dead. Quigley points out to Violet that he is probably the survivor of the fire mentioned on page 13 of the Snicket file, and when you figure that Quigley has probably seen parts of the Snicket file since he was working with Jacques, you can probably trust his information. And I don’t think we were intended to think that one of the parents would be alive after that, because the kids really stop looking for them after that the end of that book. They are still looking for answers, and they still have a dim hope that maybe one of their parents survived via the underground tunnel, but a search for their parents is no longer a focus of the story.

I also read that we never find out who J.S. is, but after rereading The Penultimate Peril, I think we were all making that too complicated. It was Jerome Squalor and Justice Strauss. No further mystery.

I also figured out on a second reading that the letters to Beatrice were not the same as the letters from Beatrice, although first I thought it was just a time difference — that the letters from her were written earlier, when she was a little girl. But that doesn’t work because she mentions Violet, Klaus, and Sunny. So I guessed that there was a second Beatrice, and I figured she had to be a sibling, but I wasn’t sure if she was younger or older. Obviously I was wrong about who she was, but I was right that there were two of them (not counting the boat).

Obviously he left a lot of questions, but a lot was answered, too, even though some of the spoilers I read said that these questions were left hanging. We do know what happened to the Quagmires — they got swallowed up by the great unknowable, whatever that is. We do know that there is another hotel under the one that burned; that was answered in The Penultimate Peril, so it did not really need to be answered in The End. (And Snicket confirms that it is still there, and someone is still cataloguing, and it hasn’t been found.) We know what was in the sugar bowl (and I think it’s clear that Lemony Snicket has it, that he retrieved it from the pond and had it with him in the taxi when he tried to get the Baudelaires to leave the hotel with him). We know why Count Olaf felt entitled to the Baudelaires’ fortune, since their parents killed his parents and all.

We don’t know some other stuff, or at least I don’t, although I suspect I just didn’t figure it out. Who was the woman who retrieved the sugar bowl from the grotto and took it to Captain Widdershins? I think it was probably Kit Snicket, but I’m not sure. What was the message that Captain Widdershins and Phil left in the refrigerator for the orphans when they abandoned the submarine? I didn’t understand the code, but there was definitely a message. (Six lemon-lime sodas, a bit of soft cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a cake that said “Violet’s Fifteenth Date.”) What was up with the Poes?

And who was Bruce? I think Bruce was Lemony Snicket, but maybe that’s too easy, or too much thinking. Maybe he’s just another volunteer, albeit one who is sort of mysterious and who always seems to turn up at crucial moments.

And, of course, we don’t know what happens next. In the Beatrice letters, the poster and the coded message make it clear that the boat “Beatrice” sinks. The whisk, the hair ribbon, and Klaus’s glasses all float up into a cave somewhere, and the boat is in pieces. We know that little Beatrice somehow makes it to civilization, but are the Baudelaires dead? Did the great unknowable thingie get them? How could Beatrice have heard Sunny’s voice on the radio unless Sunny survived? Are they just separated, or are the older orphans dead?

Maybe that all comes in the next book.

No, this post will not contain spoilers for The End, because I don’t have my copy yet. But I did read The Beatrice Letters, which convinced me that I needed to go back and read the entire series again. I last read the first four books right after they came out, and I listened to the others on audio, which means I probably missed a lot. So after first rereading The Penultimate Peril, I went back to the beginning and started over with The Bad Beginning, and I’m currently in the middle of The Slippery Slope.

I’m not really trying to figure anything out, though, because I think I will be disappointed if I do. The Beatrice Letters reinforced my suspicion that there is not going to be a satisfying resolution. My main reason for feeling that way is the time frame: Beatrice (if there even is such a person; some people think she is a boat, I think she may just be Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego, and who knows, maybe she’s the Baudelaire’s mother, although I think an older sister is far more likely) mentions hearing Sunny on the radio, suggesting that everything between her and Snicket happens in some future time. But Snicket’s hidden message to his sister in The Slippery Slope says that he will meet her at the Hotel Denouement on Beatrice’s birthday … but the hotel has already burned down as of the end of The Penultimate Peril. Maybe he means the hotel under the lake?

In any case, if there is this whole mystery with Lemony Snicket and Beatrice that happens in the future, and if Beatrice is left wondering where her family is, I just don’t see how we are going to get a resolution to both that mystery and the mystery of the Baudelaires all in one book, unless Lemony Snicket turns out to have been a completely unreliable narrator all along. Which I think may be how it works out, but if so, there is not really any point in trying to guess what is going to happen. Either we are going to get another thirteen books, or we are going to be left without any answers. I think that is a given.

My only remaining guess: I still think that the Baudelaire parents are the man with a beard but no hair, and the woman with hair but no beard, although I think the “man” is Mrs. Baudelaire and the “woman” is Mr. Baudelaire, since they are obviously in disguise. And I think they killed Count Olaf’s parents with poison darts at the opera, although that is not so much a guess as something that is pretty much given away in the text.

And as for Beatrice, if she is not just Lemony Snicket’s alter-ego (or if Snicket isn’t HER alter-ego), I think she is probably the Baudelaire’s oldest sister, one who was taken away by V.F.D. as a child (before the schism?). In The Slippery Slope, Violet recalls someone having heard the words “the world is quiet here” sung to her when she was a child; maybe it was her sister who sang the words. Or the people who stole her sister.

But who are Count Olaf’s siblings? He must have some. For that matter, who are Esmé’s siblings? Beatrice’s, if she’s not a Baudelaire? Everyone seems to have siblings. And who is “R,” the Duchess of Winnepeg? I assume we’ll find all of that out in The End, even if we don’t learn much else.

If you have read The End and want to post about it in the comments, please provide plenty of spoiler space for anyone who doesn’t want to have it all ruined.

The Inimitable Jeeves. I should probably be embarrassed to admit that this is my first Wodehouse. I’m not even sure that’s accurate, because the stories seemed so familiar that I am not sure whether I actually read this in high school, or whether Wodehouse has just been imitated and adopted into popular culture to such an extent that his work seems familiar even if you’ve never actually read any of his stories.

In any case, I loved it, of course. But by the time the collection was over, I was ready for it to be over. I have a half dozen more collections downloaded, but I haven’t been in the mood to listen to any more. I’m sure I will be eventually, but I think I like Wodehouse in small doses.