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 heaveho’d from our communal vocabulary!”And so it begins. Nollop, a tiny island-nation off the coast of the United States, holds its founder, Nevin Nollop, in the highest regard. His greatest achievement is having come up with the pangram “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. And what, you may be wondering, is a pangram? It’s a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet. Repetitions are allowed, but the fewer there are, the more impressive it’ll be. In the centre of Nollop stands a statue of its founder with the pangram he created written in tiles right beneath it. As the excerpt I shared tells you, when the tiles begin to fall, the island’s High Council interprets it as a message from the venerable Nevin – surely he must want the fallen letters banned from the islander's vocabularies.
In addition to being a dystopia, Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel. The story is told in letters between Ella and several of her friends and family. Because Nollop is a totalitarian state, the mail is controlled. What this means is that as the fallen letters are banned, Ella and her correspondents are no longer allowed to use them, and so they disappear from the novel itself. The fact that we get to watch the characters come up alternative ways to express themselves, with ways to overcome the increasingly tight limits that are put on their means of communication and self-expression, is one of the main reasons why Ella Minnow Pea such a wonderful read.
However, if this book were merely an exercise in linguistic acrobatics, it might be satisfying for language nerds such as myself, but not much else. But fortunately, there’s much, much more to love here. The themes Ella Minnow Pea deals with – censorship, freedom, totalitarianism – are not exactly new, but they’re presented in such an original way that it feels new. Besides, the truth is that we’ll probably never run out of things to say about totalitarianism or censorship—not while they continue to affect people’s lives.
The way in which the High Council of Nollop tries to use language to control its citizens reminded me a little of Orwell’s 1984 and its newspeak. Of course, in many ways it’s completely different, because the aim of newspeak was to make certain thoughts unthinkable by stripping the language bare. The High Council can control communication, but not people’s private thoughts. In their heads, the characters surely continue to use the forbidden letters freely. Still, this tight control of communication is enough to fill Ella Minnow Pea with a pervasive sense of claustrophobia; one that greatly increases as the story advances and more and more letters are banned. Ella’s final letters are filled with a despair that is all the more raw because it cannot be articulated – and this makes them quite frightening to read.
There are some truly horrifying moments in Ella Minnow Pea, such as this:
They shut the library down today. By day’s end workmen had it totally boarded up. I spent much of the afternoon helping Rachalle box up items to transfer to the supply cabinets of Mother’s school. Her second graders wore such heart-tugging looks of confusion when the principal confiscated all the textbooks. Mother spent much of the school day in halt and stammer lest she speak the proscribed letter and find herself brought up on charges. It makes teaching so difficult, she tells me—having to spell out each word in her head before speaking it, to prevent accidental usage, while attempting to deliver a lesson without benefit of any textbook whatsoever!But there are moments of humour too, especially early in the book, when the High Council’s actions seemed more like a passing eccentricity than a real problem:
Dear Sister GwennneetttttteAs I was reading Ella Minnow Pea, I kept thinking that it’s pretty much impossible to translate. I’m sure the same concept could be used to basically create a similar novel in another language, but it would take a writer just as inventive as Mark Dunn. And plus the final result couldn't, by definition, be the same book. Can you think of any other novels that you find untranslatable? What are they, and why?
Robbed of two letters, I now chooooose to overuuuse the twenty-four which remaaaaaain.
I hope you and Amos are well. I haven’t been feeeeeeling myself lately. Tassie worrrrrrrrries about me. She shouldn’t. I will bounce back as I always do do do do do do do do do.
Your sister Mittieeeeeeeeeeeee
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(I probably missed quite a few...let me know if yours was one of them and I'll be glad to add it.)