Penguin Island is written in the style of a sprawling 18th- and 19th-century history book, concerned with grand
metanarratives,
mythologizing heroes,
hagiography and
romantic nationalism. It is about a fictitious island, inhabited by
great auks, that existed off the northern coast of Europe. The history begins when a wayward Christian missionary monk lands on the island and perceives the
upright, unafraid auks as a sort of pre-Christian society of
noble pagans. Mostly blind from reflections from the polar ice and somewhat deaf from the roar of the sea, having mistaken the animals for humans, he baptizes them. This causes a problem for
The Lord, who normally only allows humans to be baptized. After consulting with saints and theologians in Heaven, He resolves the dilemma by converting the baptized birds to humans with only a few physical traces of their ornithological origin, and giving them each a soul. Thus begins the history of Penguinia, and from there forward the history mirrors that of France (and more generally of Western Europe, including German-speaking areas and the British Isles). The narrative spans from the
Migration Period ("
Dark Ages"), when the Germanic tribes fought incessantly among themselves for territory; to the heroic
Early Middle Ages with the rise of
Charlemagne ("Draco the Great") and conflicts with
Viking raiders ("
porpoises"); through the
Renaissance (Erasmus); and up to the modern era with motor cars; and even into a future time in which a thriving high-tech civilization is destroyed by a campaign of terrorist bombings, and everything begins again in
an endless cycle. ==Analysis==