Having turned over a new leaf I have been an active campaigner against the War On Snicket, calling for the full legalisation of Snicket only to be recently informed that Snicket was never illegalised. I don't quite know what to do with this information.

You don't always get what you want but sometimes you get what the person who gives it to you has been telling you it's going to be all along. So we get The End, and The End is full of all the things that should be resolved or should have been resolved, many of them overshadowing the series from the Bad Beginning, many only arriving now to be briefly mentioned. There are mysteries that have haunted the whole series and mysteries that have haunted other, hypothetical, series, fragments, allusions, glimpses, tangents, all enough to acquire a critical mass of unresolved secrets and stories and mysteries and I suppose one could get cross at this but it isn't as if the narrator has not been warning you repeatedly that the last thing you should expect from this series of books is any kind of satisfaction. A series of books narrated by a person who is clearly and sincerely and articulately desolate at the cruelty and misery it contains, who would be flabbergasted at the idea of this as entertainment or fun, for whom the conventions of children's stories, which require good people to be relentlessly inflicted with horror and treachery, are torture, as they should be to any soul with a hint of sensitivity. He would not be impressed with complaints about lack of plot resolution and mysteries left mysterious and secrets left hidden. He would wonder if the complainant had been reading the same books he'd been writing at all.

Of course there is a whole other story going on: the little community on the island, figures from The Tempest and the Lotus Eaters and no doubt many others, leading bland, safe lives eschewing violence for peer pressure. Naturally it is full of secrets and a schism is forming, to be precipitated by the arrival of the orphans and Olaf. No place is safe from the treachery of the world. The children escaped the early cycles of the series, to be plunged into newer, larger cycles, and the breaking of those, the denouement at Hotel Denouement, has merely propelled them to the beginning of another, even larger cycle that encompasses their parents and the Snickets and VDF So there is no escape from the treachery, villainy, and injustice of the world, and that is what this series has been about, and that is what happens in The End.

But other things happen, too, other things that have happened just as consistently through the series. There is survival and resilience and fierce burning love. There is regret and guilt and self-doubt, but there is refusing to allow them to rule you, and getting on with what needs to be done. There is invention and intelligence and good taste and the joy of those things. Life goes on. There is no schism there, no betrayal. There is hope, because ambiguity cuts both ways. We may be born astride the grave, but there's time to enjoy the flight, even if it is a fall.

Of course it's not a happy ending. There's no such thing. But it's a start.