Date: 27 November 2016
Location: Gary & Peggy
The Happy Bookers met in November at Gary and Peggy’s to discuss Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable by Mark Dunn. The novel’s setting is on the island of Nollop, located off the coast of South Carolina. It is an independent, highly literate nation named after its founder Nevin Nollop, the inventor of the well-known phrase “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
Nollop is governed by a council of five members who begin to carry their reverence for its founder to ridiculous and dangerous lengths when letters of the famous sentence begin falling off the base of Nollop’s statue. The council members decide that the fallen letters are some kind of divine message from Nollop and islanders are ordered to refrain from using these letters (and words containing the letters) in their spoken and written vocabulary. The punishment for disobeying is severe–three strikes and you’re out–and islanders begin leaving voluntarily or by penalty (and their property is forfeit to the council members). Those who remain can hardly communicate with each other and, of course, all books are eventually banned. A young journalist arrives from the mainland and begins to secretly work with main character, Ella, to convince the only council member who retains a scrap of reasonableness to reconsider their position, i.e. that Nollop is somehow sending a divine message to drop these letters from use. He agrees only if someone is able to come up with another pangram that is shorter than Nollop’s, thus proving that Nollop is not divine.
This short novel is part farce and part fable, but all fun for lovers of the written word.
— Bonnie