I recently read Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn: “A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable” in which the island inhabitants are required to use less and less letters of the alphabet in their speech and writing as they drop of the memorial statue of the island’s creator. The epitaph reads; ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ and as each letter falls, the council decide it must be ‘a sign’ and banish each letter from use with severe punishments for offenders. The story is written in the form of correspondence letters between the islanders and some outsiders.
It’s cleverly written. As the alphabetical letters decrease, so to the the correspondence letters. The characters record their dialogue and the difficulty of self-censoring with the frequently changing rules as each letter falls from the memorial. The dialogue becomes so reduced and bastardised, morphing gradually from eloquent prose to stupified text-speak. It is a Orwellian dystopia poking fun at the seemingly random and absurd reasons that certain words are banned in contemporary society and reductive dialogue.
