ELLA MINOW PEA
-Mark Dunn
ISBN:0-9673701-6-7
Predisposition of reviewer:
This book seemed to be right down my alley. The subtitle- a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable, said it all- a word game within the content of a novel that uses as a device a series of letters like Flowers for Algernon or The Diary of Anne Frank. The library took so long in processing this book after they received it I almost went out and bought the darn book myself. I was eager.
The Cover:
Nice cover; shiny bright green with a picture of a pod with five brown and yellow peas.
The Story:
Sometime in the late nineteenth century an
island off the South Carolina coast became disenchanted with the ways of mainland and so withdrew from South Carolina and the
Union of States and formed their own country. It was such a small island that nobody cared. Strangely, somewhat like the ersatz country of Awad, the raison d’existence of this tiny republic was the preservation of good language and words.
The as-they-became, nollopians named their new country Nollop, after Nevin Nollop the creator of the famous pangram the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. The Nollopians, like the Mormons were ruled by elected Elders, and like the Amish they disdained the use of some modern conveniencies and communicated by writing letters to each other much as we do here at Awad except they continued the nineteenth century tradition of letter writing by being ever-so-kind and polite. Here, comparisons with Awad end. Anu created his monster and then left town. Nevin Nollop never knew he had a monster to create.
One day a “Z” fell off the statue of Nellop. The Elders being Elders decided that this was a sign from Nellop and so banned the “Z” from nellopian communication. Punishment for using a “Z” in a letter or sign was (a) public humiliation and then (b) banishment, under the threat of death. This was no real problem at first, all you do is spell zebra with a S, but two days later an “E” fell off. And so forth, the glue, you see, was faulty.
The Good, The Bad, The Bland : The book is a quick read -two hours tops. Mark Dunn is a gifted letter writer and a wordpuzzlemaster equal to the studied skill of this board. Therein lies the problem. The book is a one-trick pony, or maybe a two-trick if you count the ending. A story set perfectly for an examination of the nature of the absurdities of those who rule, deterioates into the story of a writer trying to write his story with progressively fewer and fewer letters of the alphabet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what the hell, thinks the reader, resisting the urge to skip the harder and harder to read clever constructions and go straight to the end.
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