There is a simple test to see whether a child will like reading Lemony Snicket books, says the man who wrote them over tea at a Dublin hotel: “If there was a small child here who said, ‘Can I have one of those cookies?’, I might say, ‘One of those cookies is poisoned. We have no idea which one.’” And, adds Daniel Handler, who wrote the bestselling, 13-volume series A Series of Unfortunate Events, under the pen name Lemony Snicket, “there’s the sort of child who is alarmed by that and the sort of child who delights in it.”
So the latter would enjoy the bittersweet adventures of the tragically orphaned Baudelaire siblings and their travails with venal uncle Count Olaf and his unpleasant henchpersons? “That’s right,” laughs Handler, joined by his wife, graphic artist Lisa Brown, who is sketching on a nearby sofa. “People say, ‘How old does a child need to be to appreciate Lemony Snicket?’ And I say, ‘It’s not how old, it’s the arrival of irony.’”
Daniel and Lisa’s nine-year-old son, Otto, perhaps unsurprisingly given his genetic makeup, understood all this very early. “Before he could talk,” says Handler, “we would go for a walk and I would say: ‘If I see a tree, I’m going to go crazy,’ and he would point at a tree and I would pretend to go crazy. Or I’d say: ‘If I see a piece of gum on the sidewalk I’m going to fall on the ground,’ and he’d point at the gum. I still meet children who, when I make that kind of joke, are alarmed.” Handler affects dismay that such children exist. “Some of them are my nieces. You can’t win them all.”
Handler, a 44-year-old San Franciscan, completed the Lemony Snicket books in 2006, and then started a sequence of prequels called All the Wrong Questions, which so far amounts to five novels. But we’re meeting to talk about his latest foray into grownup fiction, a novel called We Are Pirates. To enjoy it, Handler argues, you’ll need the temperament his son mastered when preverbal. “I think all of my work has a certain tone: it looks askance at the world, it understands that it can be serious and hilarious at the same time. And there seem to be people who get that. And people who don’t, of course.”
Will the readership for We Are Pirates be those irony savvy kids who grew up reading Lemony Snicket? “I don’t know,” he replies. “The last couple of Snicket tours that I’ve gone on, I’ve been meeting more and more people in their 20s who grew up on my work. And when All the Wrong Questions started, I was meeting a lot of twentysomethings, a lot of Snicket tattoos. So I’m curious to see if this is something they’re interested in.”
They may well be enticed by the jacket blurb, which describes We Are Pirates as “a dark, rollicking, stunningly entertaining human comedy”, although Handler balks at the dark comedy tag. “I think of dark comedies as books that have scorn for everybody. That’s not what I want. I think of a dark comedy as Evelyn Waugh – this is ridiculous and this is ridiculous. That’s part of it but also this is sad and human and pitiful and wondrous, even.”
But in today’s popular imagination, piracy signifies none of those things. Rather, it suggests either the camp or the terrifying – the former typified by Johnny Depp impersonating Keith Richards for the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise, the latter involving harrowing tales of kidnappings off the coast of Somalia. Handler confounds these notions and instead performs a genre mash-up. “If you can understand that a book can contain machetes and minor inconveniences, be horrific and funny, then you’ll enjoy my kind of literature. If you think it has to be one or the other then you won’t, I guess.”As a 15-year-old high school student, he was asked to choose a career from a list. “There was a box marked ‘other’, and I thought what possible career could you put there? On a whim I put pirate.”
Three decades later We Are Pirates is the perverse fictional realisation of that teenage whim, imagining what it would be like if some oddballs were bent on a life of nautical crime, not on the high seas, but in the mock-heroic milieu of San Francisco Bay in the 21st century. “I got interested in what sort of people would try to become classical pirates in the modern day, interested in the idea of trying to be off the map and behaving like rogues.”
His idea was that there were two kinds of 21st-century people to whom becoming pirates might particularly appeal – teenage girls and the elderly. In his prefatory note to the reader, Handler argues that these two groups are “generally ignored”. Oh come on, I counter: aren’t teenage girls, at least, the focus of too much rather than too little attention? “I think their real selves are ignored. Certainly, that’s how it feels in American culture. They’re fetishised and sold to but not paid much attention to, I think. The book is dedicated to my sister, and one of the reasons is that I watched her hit adolescence with a fury that I hadn’t seen in anyone before. I think it was a fury of wanting to do anything other than what was expected of her, which was a very narrow set of female types.”
In the book teenage Gwen disappears from her family home, teams up with her similarly minded friend Amber, and – after assembling a motley crew including a man with dementia, a disgruntled Haitian care worker and a besotted adolescent boy – steals a faux pirate ship rigged up for tourists and heads out for adventure. When these 21st-century pirates find it, though, the comedy heads into deeper, darker waters.
If there is a literary precursor to We Are Pirates, it is Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel A High Wind in Jamaica. “I read Hughes’s novel when I was young. Up to that point, piracy for me had been some swashbuckling movies but primarily Peter Pan. I think it was the first book I read about piracy as something desperate and dire and not jolly.”
Handler concedes that he had great trouble writing his book. “As I started there were two things I thought I couldn’t tackle, and one of them was what it felt like to have a child and to worry about a child.” In between the first and last drafts, happily, Otto was born. “Once I had a child I knew how it goes.”
A bigger stumbling block was his decision to have the pirate ship captained by a madman. “I thought that would be a wonderful thing to have on ship.” In the first drafts, though, it became clear that Handler didn’t understand his protagonist. “I was using the worst stereotypical portrayals of dementia that I had seen in mass culture and I didn’t like it.” To overcome his ignorance, he contemplated doing voluntary work with people who had it. “But that would have felt strange and exploitative. Then my father began to suffer from this disease, and so then I had effectively a front row seat.”
What was that like? “I would take him for walks, and we would have the same conversations over and over again. In some ways that reminded me of writing dialogue – you write it and you go back and you write it again. He was a huge opera fan so he would talk about opera, or he would talk about vacations he’d had so everything would become this huge morass of conversation … that’s actually how it is but no one is allowed to talk that way. You carry stories with you but you’re not really allowed to braid them into your life.”
That, I suggest, seems pertinent to the novel’s theme – how living in a well-ordered human world constrains us to behave in ways inimical to our happiness. Handler agrees: “It is about what ways of escape are available to us and how it feels to escape. Part of the thing with dementia is that you detach from your mind and thoughts, and there are some aspects of it that can look liberating, as terrible as it is to say. Then there all the other aspects to it, which are, of course, horrible.”
His father died last year. “It’s some comfort for me to talk about it because I know he would be tickled pink to know that any aspect of his life would find its way into my work. Every so often there would be some Snicket interview that asked about him and he always loved it.”
Handler is in Dublin to receive Trinity College’s Philosophical Society’s gold medal of honorary patronage. That seems fitting because We Are Pirates raises philosophical questions about the human condition. On the book’s penultimate page, Handler writes: “We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves, and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back. We are pirates.” That’s a very American vision, I say to Handler, coming from a nation that enshrines the right to happiness in its constitution – but doesn’t it conceive of happiness as a commodity, as booty to be piratically appropriated? “I don’t know if commodity is the right word but it [happiness] feels finite. We’ve constructed a world in which the happiness of some depends on the unhappiness of others. We’d rather have an electronic device without knowing who made it, and we’d rather sip tea in comfortable circumstances and not think of who brought the tea cup or who picked the tea. But we also have a dream about the world in which everybody’s equally happy all the time – but it doesn’t appear to be, right?”
We Are Pirates is an undeniably odd book – Neil Gaiman describes it as “like the result of a nightmarish mating experiment between Joseph Heller and Captain Jack Sparrow”. Handler giggles at that encomium. “If I had to cleave to one of the two I would cleave towards Heller. I’m always happy to be compared to anybody good.”
Handler’s novels for adults include Why We Broke Up, Adverbs, The Basic Eight and Watch your Mouth, but most critical attention has focused on his Lemony Snicket books. He says he’s often asked if it upsets him that one part of work has got more attention than another. “I think: ‘What sort of terrible person would I be if there was a parade in my honour, but I said about the colour of the balloons, ‘I don’t know, it doesn’t seem right’?”
Now, a TV adaptation of the Lemony Snicket books is to be made by Netflix. When a film was made of the first volume, Handler reportedly wrote eight separate drafts before giving up to be replaced by Galaxy Quest screenwriter Robert Gordon. Will Handler be involved creatively with the TV version? “We’ll see. They’re looking for a director now, and it depends if it’s someone who wants to be in the same room as me and someone I want to be in the same room with. I’m trying to get better about my instincts towards collaboration because I’ve done some and quite a lot of it has gone well and some has gone terribly.”
We meet shortly after Handler has apologised for a remark he made at the National Book awards in New York, at which Jacqueline Woodson won the award for young people’s literature for her book Brown Girl Dreaming. “I told Jackie she was going to win,” Handler told the audience shortly after Woodson collected her prize. “And I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer – which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your minds. I said, ‘You have to put that in a book.’ And she said, ‘You put that in a book.’ And I said, ‘I’m only writing a book about a black girl who’s allergic to watermelon if you, Cornel West, Toni Morrison and Barack Obama say, ‘This guy’s OK.’” His speech was widely attacked as racist and prompted Woodson, who is black, to write a piece for the New York Times in which she argued that “in making light of that deep and troubled history” by using an image fraught with racist history, Daniel Handler had “come from a place of ignorance”.
Handler apologised via Twitter, donated $10,000 to the social media campaign We Need Diverse Books and promised to match donations up to $100,000. “It was a terrible mistake,” he says. “I like to think of myself as good at apologies so I hope I did that well.”
Before he leaves, I ask Handler to sign a copy of the third Lemony Snicket book, The Wide Window, for my daughter, who liked that volume most of all. “To Juliet, a future orphan. DH (allegedly LS)”, he writes. Bloody cheek, I think, as I read the inscription on the flight back to London. I still haven’t given her the signed copy. My daughter likes irony, but I don’t think she – or I – are quite ready for that sentiment.
• We Are Pirates is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
• This article was amended on 9 February 2015. An earlier version referred to the “tragically orphaned Baudelaire twins” in the A Series of Unfortunate Events books. There are three Baudelaire siblings, but no twins.
