How the Penguins Saved Veronica

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-14

Chapters 15-26

Chapters 27-39

Chapter 40-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Coping with Loss

The novel’s two central characters exhibit maladaptive strategies for coping with loss. Veronica suffered several losses in quick succession while only a teenager. First, her parents were killed during a bombing raid. Then, her lover was taken away by the army without warning. Her infant son was also adopted away from her without her knowledge or consent. That these people all meant something to Veronica is symbolized by the strands of hair she has kept in her locket to maintain her connection with them. That said, she goes for years without opening the locket. Instead, she seals it inside her memento box and tries to forget its existence. Even after she begins wearing the locket again on Locket Island, she refuses to discuss its contents with anyone else for fear of opening the floodgates of grief. For Veronica, tears are a sign of weakness, and she prides herself on her ability to contain her sorrow. She has spent the better part of her life suppressing rather than acknowledging her feelings.

Her grandson fails to cope in a different way. Patrick has also had a difficult past. His father abandoned him as an infant, and his mother died by suicide when he was only six. After this, he lived in five different foster homes, none of which made him feel like he was a part of the family. He relies on drugs and alcohol to dull his own sense of loss. When the novel opens, his latest girlfriend has just abandoned him, triggering memories of earlier heartache. He is wallowing in his misery when Veronica first meets him. Ironically, she fails to recognize that he suffers from the same problem that she does. Neither one can come to terms with their grief. Instead, Veronica judges Patrick harshly for failing to shape up and continues to firmly suppress her own sorrow.

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For both characters, communication allows them to break out of their self-imposed prisons. Veronica shares her diaries with Patrick, letting him access the part of her past that nobody else knows. In turn, he explains his own tragic childhood to her, allowing her to make sense of his undisciplined behavior. Of the two, Veronica is the tougher nut to crack because she’s spent several more decades refusing to acknowledge her heartache. It takes an orphaned penguin to remind her that she has a heart. Only at that point can real healing from loss begin.

Isolated Lives

One of Veronica’s tactics for cutting her losses is to cut off all interaction with the world. She lives in isolation on a grand estate in Scotland, tended only by a gardener and a housekeeper. These two employees aren’t taken into her confidence either. She prefers to keep her own counsel. At one point, the well-meaning Eileen tells Patrick that old people who don’t share their thoughts and feelings with others are at great risk of developing dementia. Patrick is hardly in a position to help since he also seems prone to isolating himself. While he occasionally meets Gav at the pub, he leads a solitary life. His job at the bicycle shop only takes a few hours each week. The rest of his time is spent agonizing over his lost girlfriend and his directionless life.

Patrick and Veronica aren’t the only characters in the book leading isolated lives. The entire research team in Antarctica is doing the same. Dietrich misses his wife and children, yet he spends the better part of each year in a frozen environment. Mike’s abrasive personality might isolate him in any setting, and it does just that when he shows visible frustration over Veronica’s presence on Locket Island. Although Terry is the most emotionally accessible of the three, she also prefers the company of penguins to people. At one point, she tells Veronica that her sensitive nature makes it hard for her to cope with humanity en masse. She finds it easier to relate to the penguins and the few humans on the research team. This is one of the reasons that she resists Patrick’s offer to join him in England near the end of the novel.

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While Veronica is the most extreme example of isolation in the novel, she demonstrates some desire to break out of her prison. After initially being disappointed by Patrick’s failure to live up to her standards of the ideal grandson, she transfers her attention to penguins. Terry tells Veronica that penguins are easier to tolerate than people. “You can’t ever have too many penguins. They’ve got a different sort of energy to humans. It’s more fundamental and earthy. They don’t agonize over things. They don’t have issues” (102). Since all of Veronica’s sorrows were caused by people, penguins constitute a bridge, allowing her to transition from total isolation to renewed contact with humanity. This bridge allows the rest of the characters to also move from isolated lives to lives of connection. Dietrich returns home to be with his family, leaving the team’s leadership to Terry. Patrick falls in love with Terry, establishes a bond with Veronica, and finds a home and a job on Locket Island. Mike, too, learns to accept both Pip and Veronica, as well as Terry’s leadership, proving that isolation—even self-imposed isolation, doesn’t have to be permanent.

The Quest for Connection

Veronica’s story arc in the novel can be characterized as a quest for connection. The minute she digs out her memento box, it becomes Pandora’s box that unleashes a flood of unpleasant memories. However, according to the Greek myth, once Pandora’s box was emptied, hope remained. Veronica briefly becomes hopeful at the prospect that she might have a grandchild somewhere out in the world. Her hopes are immediately dashed when she meets the disheveled Patrick. He is recovering from his own troubles but fails to explain this to his grandmother. For her part, she makes no attempt to understand his perspective either. Connection usually begins with communication, but neither character is initially forthcoming.

Disappointed in her grandson, Veronica searches elsewhere for someone or something to ground her. Since she is such a poor communicator with other people, the only person to get through to her is a TV star broadcasting a show about the plight of penguins. While Veronica refuses to interact with living people, she readily interacts with a television screen and finds her interest piqued by what Robert Saddlebow has to say. Even more significant is the cause he champions. He wants to save birds, not people. Veronica dislikes people, both collectively and individually, so connecting with a flock of birds seems less of a hurdle than connecting with a roomful of chattering humans.

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When Veronica gets to Locket Island, she finds the penguins to be noisy and unsanitary but charming. Part of what draws her interest is their interconnectedness. The penguins live in a colony where individuals form connections with one another. In a pivotal scene, after Veronica has shared her heartbreak with Terry, she goes to visit the colony and realizes the importance of their interconnectedness: “Sheltering together, feeding together, arguing together, sleeping together. That is it, I realize. That’s the thing that gives their life purpose. That ‘together’ that has been so lacking in my own life” (233). Veronica then forms her own personal connection to a single penguin chick. This makes the collective personal for her and binds her to Pip, weaving her into the colony as a surrogate mother.

Patrick has a similar need to belong but doesn’t know how to connect until he reads Veronica’s diaries. She made the initial attempt to find him and then made the decision to allow him access to her past. Patrick’s desire for connection does the rest. He expresses the same need for connection when he sees Veronica hovering on the point of death: “I don’t want Granny to die. I’m feeling feelings I haven’t had in years. A sudden, violent need for family connection” (263). For both characters, their desire for connection is met by the people and penguins that surround them.