Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1569 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
"...incredibly funny, incredibly charming..." Natalie Haynes -- A Good Read, BBC Radio 4, 2nd June 2009

Review
"The most original novel I have ever read ... everyone should read it" Sarah Broadhurst

Synopsis
Nevin Nollop left the islanders of Nollop with the treasured legacy of his pangram "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". But as the letters begin to crumble on the monumental inscription, the island's council forbids the use of the lost letters and silence threatens Ella and her family.

Customer Reviews

Delightfully Fantastical Treat
This is a hugely enjoyable epistolary lipogram about the tragic aftermath of the infamous Nollopian pangram (they tell you what those words mean at the start of the book, just to make you feel smart before you need to reach for your dictionary on page one). Who could have thought "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" could cause so much trouble?

This is a novel about corrupting, political power that Orwell himself would be proud of. On a tiny island the author of the above infamous sentence is revered as a god, being the only islander to have accomplished anything. A statue celebrating his sentence begins to crumble and lose the tiles, so the council decides to bar islanders from using the fallen letters. The story is told through notes between the struggling islanders and in an ever decreasing vocabulary. The surprise is that Dunn still manages to use beautiful and intricate language, each sentence is a joy to savour. A rare find; a fantastically imaginative story written in a deliciously rich and thoughtful manner to celebrate language.
This is undoubtedly one of the greatest debut novels we've ever been treated to.

L, M, N, O, P!
With Ella Minnow Pea, Dunn has created a truly original work of fiction. The story is a witty comment on the perils of fundamentalism, with hilarious results. His mastery of linguistic experiment is utterly innovative and unreservedly shrewd.

The island, Nollop, named after the great Nevin Nollop, (creator of the pangram: ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’), is thrown into a furore after letters begin to drop one by one from the said phrase proudly displayed under the commemorative statue to Nevin in the town square. The local council, believing this to be a sign of profound significance issue an edict dictating that inhabitants must not use any of the letters that have fallen in any of their discourse or correspondence, as that would clearly contravene what appears to be a kind of divine pronouncement. Hilarity ensues.

The book is entirely comprised of the letters of correspondence to and from the eponymous Ella Minnow Pea (a pun, I believe on the alphabetical order: L, M, N, O, P…) as friends, lovers and family talk about their predicament. Slowly but surely, more and more letters begin to fall and the pool of letters from which to communicate grows ever smaller. Dunn masterfully imparts the dilemmas of Ella and company as they seek to write to each other and very skilfully manages to bring their correspondence to life, despite few, if any standard English words being available towards the end of the book. The prose (if one can call it that!) is extremely inventive and very amusing.

This is a biting satire and illuminates explicitly the farcical nature of such fundamentalist obsessions. There is a somewhat darker element to the tale however, which is slowly revealed through the correspondence. Imparted, at intervals, is the punishment of those who unwittingly contravene the edict. It is a desperate situation and many are formally punished, many leave and most live in perpetual despair. It lambastes the potential idiocy of histrionic proscriptions. I do not wish to detract too much from the humour of the book however, which permeates throughout. In addition, trust, love, friendship, and paranoia all have a part to play. The novel ends with a resolution of sorts but I have no intention of giving too much away!

Ella Minnow Pea is a fantastic achievement. It is not always a simple read given the nature of the prose on offer, but the challenge is a deeply entertaining and rewarding one. I thoroughly recommend this book, especially if you are interested in novels that attempt to play with language or that offer a slightly less conventional mode of expression.

Intelligent, witty and comical…buy it.

the quick brown fox......
every so often a book comes along that is so fresh, so new, so different and imaginitive it blows the competion away. Famous examples of this are the "left behind" series of books, "memoirs of a geisha" and most famously the lord of the rings. while not as epic as LOTR or as heartbreaking as memoirs.. this book is written with such imagination wit and skill it deserves much much more recognition that it has had. the basic storyline can be read in the amazon review so i wont bore you by repeating it here but one has to wonder where do these ideas come from?
the book is short a "single sitting" read and written entirley in the form of letters between various people. As the various letters disspapear from the monument in the story the contents of the correspondence begin to take on a surreal quality and one can imagine people sat in the village only using the alloted letters suddently shouting phrases such as "ahoy! frog makes dead jam!" and then lapsing back into silence so much of the final passages of the book are spent in wonder as you see that even with 15 letters the authour can still get these letters to make some coherent (if slighty bizarre) sense. i re read this book many times looking for mistakes one of the forbidden letters used for example but could find none and was left in awe of this writing talent!
definatley one to read give it the popularity it deserves.