Given that the literary gravy train starts this year from Platform 9^3/4 at King's Cross Railway Station, one would expect book publishers (other than Bloomsbury, Scholastic, Raincoast and Allen & Unwin, that is) to come up with some interesting ideas. Penguin seems to be toying with a combination of Mao's Hundred Flowers Movement and the Infinite Monkey theorem.

My frivolity apart, A Million Penguins is described as an experiment to answer the question - Is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? A wiki-novel project from Penguin and De Montfort University, it went public on February 1. My suspicion is that The Novel has been vaccinated against collaborative plotting.

The opening line of the wiki-novel was There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. Sounds suspiciously like It was a dark and stormy night. Anyway, the attack of the killer penguinistas ensured that it fell by the wayside.

I tried reading some of it, but the pinky-flexing Big Bababooey Benjy, the current protagonist, put me off a little. The alliterative name reminds me of what happened when an entirely unrelated experiment was tried out at Paignton Zoo in 2003.

Six Sulawesi crested macaques apparently boasted of their literary abilities, and students of Plymouth University offered their services as agents. Following talks with various publishers, the deal was clinched by the local Arts Council which advanced 2000 pounds to the students. The macaques, presumably, received peanuts, but having committed to the project, they demanded a computer to begin work.

Receiving one, the primates propitiated their collective stream of consciousness by promptly bashing the keyboard with a rock. They then interspersed prodigious literary output with sporadic ritual urination on the computer. A month later, they had produced the entire Works of Shakespeare. However, macaques are a naturally retiring bunch of people, and afraid of being the targets of a fatwah by some Witch-doctor (and of being hounded by paparazzi like the Beckhams, which was a worse fate actually), they edited mercilessly to finally hand out five pages. Still, that was far more impressive than the answer to life, the universe and everything.

It did not, I confess, quite happen that way.

The connection I was reaching for was to the fact that the letter S featured predominantly in their five pages of output. Big Bababooey Benjy sounds like they have switched to the letter B over the years.

Tags : penguin; wiki; books