(SFF Bingo): D (A Tale of Two Worlds), by Michel Faber

This book came out in 2020, and I'm pretty sure that I must have seen an article about it somewhere. I mean, it's built on a lipogrammatic conceit; the letter D goes missing and a teenage girl has to enter a portal fantasy world to save the alphabet. Okay, cool, you have my attention. But I wasn't intrigued enough to track it down, or remember the title or author.

I did come across "The Book of Strange New Worlds," also by Michel Faber on the SF/fantasy shelf at the library, more recently, and was toying with picking it up for bingo...but could never quite commit. The premise there is that a Christian pastor accepts a call from a congregation of aliens who have already adopted the English language and Christianity (so he's not proselytizing). But I read some reviews and got the sense it was going to be "SF for people who don't like SF" and/or "Christianity for people who don't like Christianity," so I gave it a pass. Maybe that's unfair, but I suspect it wouldn't be for me. Anyway, one thing that some of the reviews pointed out is that one of the "obstacles" the protagonist faces is that the aliens have a different vocalization system than we do, so it's hard for them to pronounce the letters "s" or "t," which means he has to adapt some of the Biblical vocabulary around that. Except, that shouldn't really be a huge impediment, because humans translate the Bible into different languages all the time. Unfortunately, "D" is another example of "cool premise, but underwhelming," in this case for the opposite reason; a clever writer could/should be able to do a lot more with "one of the letters is missing" than canon delivers on.

"D" is about a girl named Dhikilo, who is growing up in the UK but was adopted from Somaliland (which is contained within, but not the same entity as, Somalia; in some ways it's de facto independent, but it's not internationally recognized). So there's a sense of "stereotypical portal fantasy protagonist has parents who are either dead or useless offscreen, but we should make this more diverse; Dhikilo's birth parents are dead and/or gone because she's from a liminal sort-of-country." The book has plenty of allusions to Dickens (there's a "Bleak House," the villain gives a speech where he quotes only the good halves of the "it was the best of times" intro), Narnia (always winter but never Christmas), Lewis Carroll (the mysterious mentor is Charles Dodderfield, instead of Dodgson), and maybe the Phantom Tollbooth (trying to be playful with language).

One day, in the real world, the letter D vanishes and Dhikilo is the only one to notice. But it's just dropped from letters without any effort to work around them. Soon, donkeys and dogs themselves go missing. Then one of her former teachers dies; she skips school to go to the funeral, and when mysterious things happen at the gravesite (and she's the only person who cares enough to attend the burial), she investigates his house. One thing leads to another, and she semi-reluctantly gets drawn into the portal fantasy world, with the assistance of his guide dog/shapeshifting Sphinx.

In the fantasy world, Liminus, the Ds are also missing, in this case carried off by dragonflies. Many people carry on with just dropping the D, and Dhikilo gets in trouble for talking naturally.

"We are very thirsty," she said, speaking slowly to give herself enough time to examine each letter that came to her tongue. "Also, hungry. We were hoping that you might be willing to share some of your...erm..." She racked her brains. "Nourishment."

A few locals clandestinely rebel in secret; one group of good guys has continued to try saying D, but they got their tongues mutilated as a result. These people have been trying a ritual to bring back good weather day after day without success. Dhikilo joins them in their ritual, and lo and behold, good weather returns! A miracle? Maybe. "Or maybe, she thought, the right time just came for things to change."

So...who knows. Anyway, in the evil dystopia capital, Dhikilo continues to get in trouble with the authorities. Who are also racist, to make it clear that racism is evil, even though the city includes "the short hairy ones and the long bald ones, the lumbering soft ones and the sharp-faced darting types, the solid muscular ones and the frail specimens who looked as if a puff of wind might blow them over." But, maybe thanks to the good weather, the tyrant's ice palace melts and the evil factory that's been stealing the Ds explodes, and just as suddenly everyone decides to have a revolution and it's all good. Also, in her darkest hour, there's a voice reassuring her that her birth parents are always with her, one way or the other.

What's the connection between the Ds in our world and Liminus? Why is Dhikilo able to notice that something's wrong when no one else cares? Beyond the punny name, is there a reason that being from an unrecognized country matters, or would any refugee do? Faber doesn't care about answering any of these questions. Some of the reviews suggest that it's a YA, or even middle grade, book, in which case maybe I shouldn't nitpick that hard because I'm not the target audience. But it was shelved in the adult section at my childhood-hometown library, and apparently it is in my current-residence library too, so I'm not going to give him a pass that easily.

A book that does something similar is "Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn. In that story, letters become forbidden one by one, and people have to come up with increasingly tortured workarounds. (Everyone is aware of it, it's not just a single protagonist who recognizes the problem.) In "D" in particular (and "Ella Minnow Pea to a lesser extent), there's a lot more misspellings/phonetic spelling than actual lipogrammatic cleverness. Now, maybe I'm being unfair, because a lot of people don't care about the pleasures and cleverness of constrained writing as much as I do. But if you do, there's so much more you can do with this than a few lines of dialogue. We see a few flashes of this in "D"; early on, the music teacher abruptly quits teaching the Hallelujah Chorus because "it was in the wrong key." But I have higher standards.

Bingo: probably using it for Multiverses/Alternate Realities or Mythical Beings (the sphinx). ??? on YA.