Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

So I purchased this gem of a book on Saturday, at the local BMV. It’s subject matter intrigued me and it’s format was the selling point. The book revolves around a small fictional island off the coast of the United States, south east of Charleston, South Carolina to be exact. The island “formerly Utopianna, the country’s name was changed in 1904 to honor native son Nevin Nollop, the author of the popular pangram sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” The main characters as well as sub-characters exchange letters throughout the novel and the story is revealed through the characters letters, feelings and thoughts. It is quite a unique way to allow the progress of the story to be told. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that the statue of Nollop with the tiles of the pangram sentence falls, one piece at a time. The higher council of Nollopton, decide to take it upon themselves and deem that Nollop is communicating to them from beyond the grave. The descent of the fallen tiles results in mayhem throughout the island. As the tiles begin to fall, so do the letters in language in the town; the council deeming it illegal to speak, write or communicate the letters to anyone in the town. If 3 offenses against the law occur banishment from the island is the final solution to “sinful” Nolloptians. As people decide to banish themselves, hilarity ensues but of course not without some repentance for their offenses.

The book continues with the challenge to try to find a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet in order to save the island from this lunacy as most of it’s citizens have been banished from the island for committing offenses from the Higher council’s scriptures. From the onset of the novel we see the shift from eloquent and flowery language to phonetic, numerical language. It was quite a struggle to read some of the words as the characters letter use are limited but they continue to persevere and try to remain sane whilst communicating to the remaining citizens.

Ella Minnow Pea, has incited some thoughts about our very own language. There are many words in existence today, but we as a society are limited to the use of it. Our lexicons are not as developed as say linguistic scholars or scholars in general. How would we come to grips if say a tyrannical leader decides to pass the rule that a letter such as Z, be outlawed and we can no longer utter phrases or words that contain the letter Z. I know that Z is not as “important” in our daily vocabularies as say T or even an A, but trying to phrase words that do not contain these letters must be very taxing and it is scary to think language can dissipate the way it did in the novel.

Another entertaining thought about the novel, is the fact that the remaining citizens decided to take it upon themselves to challenge the higher council and provide a pangram sentence similar to Nollop’s which contains no proper names and can be no less than 26 letters but no more than 32. It’s quite an exciting challenge! So I challenge you to try and come up with your own pangram sentence with no assistance from the computer and no cheating by taking a sentence from the novel! Good luck!