To Miss Ella Minnow Pea:
I regret to tell yew most greephos news: Mannheim is mort. I no that yew new him, were phrents with him. That yew ant he ant his assistant Tom were worging still on the Enterprise 32 shallenge…Ella Minnow Pea was recently recommended to me as a “must read of literary playfulness”, and I have to admit that the premise sounded intriguing: On a small sovereign island off South Carolina whose inhabitants are united by a love of language — and in particular, the famous pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", whose creator Nevin Nollop has a statue in the capital city’s main square with that sentence written upon it — the citizenry have their lives and expression circumscribed by their ruling Council as the letters in the pangram fall off the statue one by one and each letter is then consequently banned from the people’s vocabulary (written and spoken), and in concert, from the book itself. I understand that author Mark Dunn is a renowned playwright (and so, presumably, a master of dialogue), so it’s strange to me that he chose a monologuing epistolary form for this, his first novel: This is a series of letters, mostly written between two cousins and their mothers (and a few others), and they go from overwrought, florid writing (to demonstrate the people’s love of language, one supposes) as they explain to one another things they should already know about the increasing restrictions on their lives, to a slightly more basic writing style as they pepper their writing with awkward synonyms to get around banned words (“she-heir” for daughter). As letters progressively fall and become forbidden, the only real interest in the book becomes: Will the people be able to fight back against the Council’s increasing fascism? And how will Dunn’s writing accommodate his self-imposed restrictions? In the end, I didn’t think that there was any logic in the plot: Dunn was simply setting up a gimmick that he ultimately undermines and does not pull off. I wish I liked this more, but to me, it failed on all fronts.
On Wednesday, July 19, the Council, having gleaned and discerned, released its official verdict: the fall of the tile bearing the letter “Z” constitutes the terrestrial manifestation of an empyrean Nollopian desire, that desire most surely being that the letter “Z” should be utterly excised — fully extirpated — absolutely heave-ho’ed from our communal vocabulary!
When the first letter falls (note: what kind of statue has its inscription written out in glued-on tiles?), the Council determines that it’s a message from Nevin Nollop himself: the people have become complacent in their devotion to language and need to become more intentional in its use; everyone over the age of seven must cease to speak or write the letter “Z” or face punishment that ranges from a warning for a first offence, to flogging, banishment, to even death. Over the course of the next four months (the glue on the tiles is analysed in an offsite lab and, as predicted, fails quickly and completely), the Council grants itself ever more draconian powers as it elevates Nollop to the status of the one-true-God. And while citizens are increasingly banished or voluntarily leave the island (and have their abandoned property seized by the Council members) as the restrictions become ever harder to comply with, Miss Ella Minnow Pea (and some few other determined citizens) make a deal with the Council: If they can find a shorter pangram than the foxy-dog sentence by November 16th (Nollop’s birthday), they will prove that Nollop is not divine and the restrictions will all be lifted and the emigrants can safely return. Because fascism is that easy to defeat. Nothing about the plot made sense to me.
As for the writing: Not only do these correspondents write in an overly verbose style, but they do so with invented vocabulary — writing of the “scissoresonance” of the bees, a protesting youth’s “boldly insolent hurlatory”, the island of Nollop is described as “a beautiful, sandy-shored haven of enchantment and delishmerelle”. Ella’s cousin Tassie writes, well into the restrictions:
”Banishment”: the next banishment victim! To become one more invisiblinguista. The 4000th, 5000th such victim? Is anyone counting? Perhaps Nollop? Expunging each entry in his Heavenly Lexicon — one at a time — until the tome’s pages stop resembling pages at all. Until they become pure expurgatory-tangibull. Ravenstriate leaves. Ebony reticulate sheets. Tenebrous night in thin tissue. Contemnation by tissue! It is almost unbearable.
And so, I was interested to see how Dunn would deal with his self-imposed restrictions as letters became less available to him in this land of inflated rhetoric, but suddenly near the end, the Council declares that it is permissible for citizens to write in homonyms for forbidden “graphemes” (leading to some nonsense-looking passages as in the first quote), while of course, not being allowed to speak aloud in homonyms (yet in an epistolary novel, the writing is all we see; there’s simply no drama here).
This is a playful concept, and I do like books that play with language, but this simply didn’t pull it off for me.
