As If Hospitals Aren't Scary Enough As It Is...

A week and a half ago I closed the book on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, leaving me free to immerse myself once more in the verbose eccentricity of Lemony Snicket. I have just completed the eighth volume in his lamentable series, and The Hostile Hospital boasts even more problems for the Baudelaire orphans than usual. There is no Mr. Poe to come and assist the children, however ineffectively, in finding a safe new home. The forever coughing banker remains out of touch in spite of the lengthy telegram the children send, begging for his assistance. Worse, they are stuck in the middle of nowhere, far enough away from civilization that they cannot keep up their journey on foot but near enough that almost everyone knows them on sight as the vicious murderers depicted in The Daily Punctilio. Because of this, while they encounter some nice enough folks in their flight from the authorities, they live with the knowledge that they cannot count on a long-term confidante; as soon as that companion learns of their supposed identity, they will be in grave danger.

This is the darkest book in the series since The Miserable Mill. While the orphans are not forced into exhausting manual labor, they are more alone than they have ever been, without a guardian of any kind or a stranger discerning enough to surmise that not everything printed in The Daily Punctilio is true. They nearly find such a friend in Hal, the elderly, visually impaired director of the Library of Records in the hospital in which they find themselves, but the orphans are forced to do something that causes him to lose his trust in them, in turn causing Violet to question whether they are becoming too much like the villains they are trying to escape.

The orphans are initially glad to find themselves at the hospital with the Volunteers Fighting Disease, an excessively cheerful group who pass out heart-shaped balloons and sing the same annoying song over and over in an attempt to spread good will but never stop long enough to do anything for the patients that might actually be useful. Could this finally be the VFD they’ve been searching for? And when the opportunity arises for them to work in the Library of Records, their luck seems to be holding. Perhaps one of the files, when combined with the shreds of notes gleaned from the notebooks of Duncan and Isadora Quagmire, will provide them with enough information to solve some of the mysteries in which they have become entwined. But none of them is prepared for what they actually do find in the file drawer, and it only adds more complexity to their plight.

Snicket’s signature style continues to amuse, though I didn’t find myself laughing out loud that often in this volume. There are serious problems afoot. Count Olaf has inevitably shown up again with Esme Squalor in tow, and they plan to do a cranioectomy on Violet while dozens of people watch. In The Miserable Mill, Violet and Sunny had to work together without their brother’s help as they strove to save him. Now, Klaus and Sunny must attempt to rescue Violet without the aid of one of her brilliant inventions. It won’t be easy.

But lighter moments do occur. The members of the VFD are comical, somewhere between a clown troupe and a band of hippies. It’s nice to have such cheerful people around in the midst of this gloom, even if their happiness is more aggravating than helpful. There are Snicket’s patently absurd metaphors to enjoy, and for the first time we get a good look at Olaf’s henchmen when they are off-duty. Moreover, there is another puzzle to be solved by astute readers. Who is Ana Gram, and what does she have to do with Violet, who has been so viciously abducted by a poorly disguised Esme? Can we figure out what Count Olaf is up to before Klaus and Sunny do, or will we find ourselves muttering, as Sunny is wont to do at this juncture, the word that is to The Hostile Hospital what “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” is to Mary Poppins -- except that it does little to make the one speaking it feel better?

I’m not sure where this volume fits into my ranking of the books in this series. While it may be low on that totem pole, I’ve long ago determined that a book by Snicket is a book worth reading, and this is no exception.