Exploring the Alphabet with Ella Minnow Pea

I’m one of those parents who sings all the time to their baby. If he actually likes it when he’s old enough to tell me, I’ll keep on doing it. And one of the songs that I sing a lot is the alphabet song, the one that shares the same tune as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Singing the phrase L-M-N-O-P over and over again made me remember the book Ella Minnow Pea, which I read when it came out back in 2001. I really hadn’t thought about it much since then but the song made me dig it out and reread it.

Ella Minnow Pea is about a tiny and fictional island nation that reveres the sentence “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” allegedly written by one of their own. When their monument to that sentence and that man begins to lose letters, it becomes illegal to use those letters in writing or in speech.

I cannot help but be reminded of James Thurber’s The Wonderful O, which features a pirate who makes the letter ‘O’ illegal on an island he takes over (“Alas. Woe is we) Ella Minnow Pea takes that idea and cranks it up to eleven.

Rereading it, I can’t help but feel that Ella Minnow Pea is a book that suffers from a split personality. On the one hand, the innate conceit of the book, the idea of banning letters, is a whimsical one that brings Edward Lear or Lewis Carol to mind. It’s silly and fun.

On the other hand, breaking that ban is punishable by either exile or death. The island council becomes an oppressive, fascist government that kills people and confiscates the land of the people it exiles. That’s serious stuff.

One of the ways that the novel manages to balance these two sides is that is told entirely through letters. Among other things, that helps tone down how nasty the government has to be. Since letters are censored by the council, the writers have to hold back from detailed descriptions.

Ultimately, I think that Ella Minnow Pea is a flawed book that is saved by its premise. The sheer concept on letters getting banned and the quest for an alternate sentence that uses the entire alphabet makes the book worth reading.