All reviews copyright 1984-2012 Evelyn C. Leeper.
ELLA MINNOW PEA by Mark Dunn:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/10/2003]
Mark Dunn's ELLA MINNOW PEA is subtitled "a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable." It is set on the island nation of Nollop, whose founder wrote the famous panagram "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which is inscribed on a plinth in the center of the capital city. One day, the letter 'Z' falls off and the council decides this is a sign that means that henceforth no one should use that letter in either speech nor writing. A few weeks, later 'Q' also falls, and so on. The book is a combination of lipogrammatic writing (i.e., writing that avoids one or more letters), a cautionary tale against losing one rights a bit at a time, and also a criticism of theocracies which claim to know the will of God. However, the last two are a bit obvious, and the first starts out clever, but becomes a bit of a cheat. (At some point, the council decides that people can write words that had the forbidden letters by spelling them differently--e.g., when they can no longer use 'U', they can write "yewniverse".) There's also a secret underground trying to construct a sentence shorter than "A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" that uses all the letters of the alphabet, because if they can, that will prove that Nollop was not divine, and the falling of the tiles shouldn't be taken as divine signs. I will leave the details of the attempt for the reader to discover. (This is in a broad sense fantasy, by the way, and I discovered it through a review in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION.)