As J.K. Rowling has triumphantly shown in her Harry Potter novels, it is possible to take one of the longest established genres in children's fiction - in her case, the school story - and to transform it, with wit and imagination, into something genuinely rich and strange. Now, from America, comes another attempted resuscitation, this time in the form of a projected sequence of 13 novels by Lemony Snicket, the first two of which are the titles reviewed here. The genre selected for revival on this occasion is that kind of story, especially popular in Victorian times, in which orphaned children have to cope with the world's vicissitudes and, in particular, with relatives and guardians often unsympathetic to their plight.
Snicket's reworking of these themes results in hilarious writing. In the original Victorian models the sufferings of the afflicted children are invariably depicted, within an evangelical framework, as fables of acceptance: young readers were clearly intended to infer significant understandings about God, His universe and their place in it. But in the Snicket versions there are no such pieties. What we are offered instead is, in effect, a sort of Gothic for beginners, mediated through the ironic, mordant voice of an omniscient narrator, whose opening sentence in The Bad Beginning strikes the tone of what is to come.
"If," he says, "you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book."
It is the interplay between this knowing, self-mocking humour and the unending catalogue of disasters of which the narratives are composed that gives these stories their special frisson. We have hardly met the Baudelaire children - Violet, Klaus and Sunny - before we learn of their parents' deaths in a fire which has also destroyed their beautiful home. In turn, this throws the children into the arms of a Mr Poe, executor of the parental estate; he, in turn, deposits them with a distant relative, the melodramatically villainous Count Olaf. As we become involved in the ensuing battle of wits and minds, Snicket teasingly plays with our hopes for the children's ultimate victory, precisely as he plays with theirs.
The teasing continues in The Reptile Room, even if initially it seems that the Baudelaires, now entrusted to amiably eccentric Uncle Monty, can expect some respite from their hardship. But, inexorably as in Greek tragedy, disaster pursues them: facing up to the death of someone much-loved will, once again, be their destiny. Certainly, there are dark, sinister forces at work here, though it is only a very superficial reading of the text that will see them as providing the dominant motif. They are wickedly undercut by Snicket's mischievous literary and linguistic games, set in a context of mock erudition concerning all matters herpetological. ("Never let the Virginian Wolfsnake near a typewriter," advises Uncle Monty at one point.)
With jokes such as this and with characters called Baudelaire and Poe, it is clear that there is more going on in Snicket's fictions than some of his young readers will grasp immediately. Let us be thankful, however, that there are still children's books which do not exhaust themselves at a first reading.
Let us be thankful also that, as a change from the ubiquitous paperback, these books come (at little more than paperback prices) in a durable hardback format which recalls, appropriately, the production values of an earlier "Golden Age" of children's literature. With their fin de siΦcle endpapers, their ex libris labels, their colourful bindings and their edgy black and white illustrations (by Brett Helquist), they comprise a handsome - and fun - addition to all our bookshelves.
Robert Dunbar's most recent book, Skimming, has just been published by O'Brien Press