Ponthe Oldenguine

by Andrew Hook

The secret history of Ponthe Oldenguine's lost BBC programs and cake stomping for dessert. Ponthe Oldenguine is one part fictional biography of a former television impresario who claims he's been hounded out of media history, and one part biography of the journalist commissioned to write his story. Where the tales merge, there is madness.

If you want a picture of the future, Trunka, imagine a boot stamping on a cake forever. Imagine just how glorious that would be.

Comic, curious, sometimes downright outrageous, Ponthe Oldenguine is a short novel in the style of slipstream, a brain-trip through the forgotten archives of the BBC: Captain Crowface, Radio Cardboard Fox, and The Town of Theberton are but a few of the seminal programs once confined to the rubbish bin and now exhumed for your reading pleasure. Part 1984, part Python, part slipstream, part realism, the life of Ponthe Oldenguine is an audacious attempt to restore the balance between sanity and insanity; illustrating what a thin line that can be. So, place your snout in the air, your hands on your tummy, and dance. But read it and believe it at your peril.

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Andrew Hook is a European writer who has been published extensively in the independent press since 1994 in a variety of genres, with over 170 short stories in print, including notable appearances in Interzone, Black Static, and several anthologies from PS Publishing and NewCon Press. His fiction has been reprinted in anthologies including Best British Horror 2015 and Best British Short Stories 2020, has been shortlisted for British Fantasy Society awards, and he was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize in 2020. As editor/publisher, he has won three British Fantasy Society awards and he also has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. Most recent publications include several noir crime novels through Head Shot Press, a novella written in collaboration with the legendary San Francisco art collective known as The Residents, and his tenth collection Candescent Blooms (Salt Publishing) which received a 5-star review in The Telegraph and was recently shortlisted for a British Fantasy Society award for best collection.

Andrew is currently working on three separate short story collections.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, so this is my book. But as it's recently been published and I always re-read my work once it's published I gave it a go and thoroughly enjoyed it! In terms of being a writer, it's interesting to gain a a different experience reading something physical rather than on a screen. The book takes on more of a life on it's own rather than a perpetual work in progress. So I defend my right to like my book. Challenge me!

[Blair]

Absolutely fantastic idea for a story and some genius touches, but overall the humour did not work for me; I wanted more unease and less wackiness. Reminded me a lot of Steve Aylett’s Lint, and if you enjoyed that, you’d like this.

[Marcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Hook’s novel Ponthe Oldenguine is an extremely difficult book to talk or write about, but this is not to say it is a difficult read. The book is fairly brief and is strange enough to hold your interest, even if you only keep reading to figure out how Hook is going to bring together all the threads he unspools. The narrator, whose identity I will, in the interest of avoiding spoilers, resist revealing here, is a journalist in search of the story that will boost his career out of mediocrity. To that end, he decides to spend a couple of nights on the street with the homeless as fodder for one of those all too familiar “experience how the other half lives” stories. He takes his sleeping bag and holes himself up in a doorway across from a Greggs. The first night out, he meets Ponthe, a man who somehow knows he is facing a reporter and is determined to tell his life stories (yes, plural).

What I mean when I say this is difficult to write is about is that the above is pretty much all that can be said without giving everything away. However, even if I were to spoil everything for you, it wouldn’t truly make sense. Ponthe Oldenguine is both utterly confusing and utterly absorbing, and there is no way to convey the experience, it simply must be read. In being read, however, Hook’s novel requires you to dive deeper and deeper into nonsense, into contradiction and into fantasy, while reconciling baffling bits of realism. He sets up the conventions of truth, narrative and fiction, then rubs them raw at the edges so they begin to bleed into one another. Reading Ponthe Oldenguine is a deeply unsettling experience, one that left me feeling as though I had fallen off the edge of reality along with the journalist, sucked in by cold nights on the street, conspiracy theories and videotape of boots stomping on cakes.

We are confronted with the ridiculous every day. Andrew Hook simply asks, “What would happen if it were all true?”

[Jenni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madness? This book has it in spades. It is narrated by a journalist who decides to go undercover and sleep rough as that will surely allow him to find the story that will elevate his career to the lofty heights he dreams of. On the very first night he is approached by Ponthe, a man who has a life story or two to tell and wants the journalist to do so. Over the course of the book we get to discover these stories, and the effect hearing them and sleeping rough has on the journalist.

It’s hard to describe much of what happens in the book without spoiling the reading experience, this really is a book that needs to be discovered page by page. As I was reading it my feelings veered between feeling that it was downright outrageous and then all too believable, a somewhat unsettling read but one that’s near enough impossible to put down.

The characters in the book are vivid creations, I never felt like I truly got a handle on them but that actually added to the reading experience. Both Ponthe and the journalist come across as being somewhat unreliable in their narration meaning you find yourself questioning everything and trying to second guess where the plot may be going. I soon gave up trying to work things out and just enjoyed the ride.

I’m not sure that I’ve done a great job of reviewing this book, but that’s because I really want people to experience it for themselves. It’s a fairly quick read but it’s one that’ll stay with you long after you’ve finished.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll preface this review with the ever so original "this is not a book I'd typically read", because it isn't. I'm not a fan of first person POV, yet I barely noticed it after the first couple of pages. The structure and style were something I've never encountered, and I was a bit concerned it would be distracting, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The story is so...weird, the characters so...rich, that you just can't stop reading. I LOVED the editors comments added as footnotes. Page 5 had me laughing so hard I made a mess of my computer screen. After that I learned not to consume beverages while reading.

I can usually predict an ending...or at least come pretty close to it and I had no clue how this would end. I like that.

I definitely recommend this for anyone with a funny bone. If you don't have a funny bone...well, it's a rough life, ain't it. :)

I look forward to reading more by this author.

[Ruth Seeley]

Here's a review of Ponthe Oldenguine: http://ow.ly/4dyrc

[Anne Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceptionally strange, in the best possible way. This will snatch you right out of your stressful state of sanity and into the giddy world of madness. Jump on in!