THE UNNAMEABLES, by Ellen Booraem, Harcourt, New York, 2008, hardcover, 336 pages, $16.
The origin of “The Unnameables” has a storybook quality to it.
A fledgling author writes a rough draft of a novel. She hates it and sticks it in a drawer while she spends two decades reporting and editing for community newspapers in coastal Maine. Then she takes a six-week writing course and decides to take another crack at her novel, quitting her day job. Within a couple of years, she finishes it, finds an agent and has her manuscript bought by a major publisher.
So now Booraem, a Brooklin resident, has a book that was selected for the Junior Library Guild catalog.
A middle-grade children’s fantasy novel, “The Unnameables” is set in a utilitarian world, on an island off the coast of Maine known as Island. On Island, everyone is named for what she or he does. Creatures who serve no purpose, such as birds, are “unnamed,” while items that have no use are seen as “unnameable.” Such things are considered heretical in the Island culture, which draws guidance from journals kept for hundreds of years by past islanders. Children are schooled in these journals.
Medford Runyuin doesn’t fit in on Island. He’s a 13-year-old orphan, an outsider in this rigid society, whose parents were killed in a boating accident.
Medford has a secret. While he’s being raised to be a carver by Boyce Carver, he finds himself creating art out of wood, which is blasphemy in this society which worships utility.
Medford’s carefully ordered world comes undone when a Goat Man from the Mainland and his smelly dog take up residence under his cabin. While he slowly becomes friends with the bizarre Goat Man, the latter’s lack of guile gets Medford in trouble with the locals. But then the secrets of others on Island start to come out, threatening the status quo.
In “The Unnameables,” Booraem artfully pits order vs. creativity, and makes the argument that there should be room for both in any society. This debut novel also begs the question of what else the author has lodged in her desk drawers.