Ella Minnow Pea

Because I had heard such praise of Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, especially at The Zen Leaf, I put it on my book wish list in February and almost immediately my brother's family picked it out and sent it to me for Jeanne Day (popularly celebrated on March 10). So I started reading it right away. I expected it to be clever, and it was; it's an epistolary novel in which every letter is a new lipogram. What I didn't expect was that the story would be so unpleasant. I would pick it up and read a page or two at a time, which was usually about all I could stomach.

There isn't that much story, really, just a set-up. The inhabitants of a fictional sea island, named "Nollop" after the fictional creator of the familiar typist's pangram "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" have taken to Nollop-worship, and so when the letters of his famous phrase begin falling off his statue, some of them take it upon themselves to forbid the use of those letters, eventually descending to torture and banishment for those who disobey. It stretched my credulity to believe that anyone would stay on the island after the first little boy was flogged, and the first mother put in the stocks.

The letters are mildly amusing, especially when they celebrate the use of one letter right before it's about to be forbidden: "Have you not noticed the product of my decision to dribble this dreadful diatribe with as many uses of the doomed fourth letter as possible?" And as the letters go on, they get more ingenious, using the word "portal" to replace the d-word for a home's entrance, for example. Eventually the letter-writers resort to nearly phonetic substitution: "I am a persister, an ootlaster."

The plot culminates with the discovery of another 32-letter pangram using all the letters of the alphabet which is included in the computer-generated list of four that serves as a postscript to the story.

The possible charm of this book lies in matching your wits against the characters'. The remaining islanders race to think of a new pangram which will allow them to abolish Nollop-worship and restore the whole alphabet before everyone is banished. The satire didn't establish enough verisimilitude to work for me, but if you approach the book as a puzzle and try to invent a 32-letter pangram using all the letters of the alphabet before the other four are revealed, you would add some interest to the plot. If you're a fan of crytoquotes and crossword puzzles, this might be just the book for you.