Books: Mob Narrative.(wiki-novel)

Byline: John Ness

A million monkeys in a million years might be able to type out Shakespeare's canon, but can a few thousand literary wannabes pull together a serviceable novel? Not if Penguin UK's new "A Million Penguins" Web site, which the company claims will create the first "wiki novel," is any indication.

The project kicked off on February 1, when Penguin invited users across the world to help write a new novel. Each visitor was given the power to begin adding to Jane Eyre's opening line ("There was no possibility of taking a walk that day,") and a few initial paragraphs. Starting with grad students from Leicester's De Montfort University, a surge of traffic soon flooded into the "Million" Web site. Legions of bookish visitors quickly sent the company scrambling in search of new servers and shattered the novel's narrative into countless bits. Characters began multiplying uncontrollably, story arcs sprawled in a hundred directions, and the quality of writing nosedived toward the incomprehensible. At one point, the book opened with the protagonist stretching the exclamation "Ooooow" across over a hundred characters. "What's most interesting here is the process, not the final ...