Penguin Island

'Believe me, the best proof is to have none at all. That is the only evidence one cannot debate.'

Anatole France's 1908 novel Penguin Island offers a thinly veiled lampoon of French history and of human civilization. When a wayward Christian missionary monk lands on an island off the northern coast of Europe, he perceives the island's seabirds, a colony of upright, unafraid auks, as a sort of pre-Christian society of noble pagans and baptizes them. This causes a problem for God, who normally...