The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder – J.W. Ironmonger

At the very least, the title and author’s curious name should attract attention, but The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder also has a rather good hook. Max Ponder is dead and he has left behind one thousand and six hundred or so volumes of his Catalogue, in which he has meticulously documented the experiences of his life. More than an autobiography, and covering only the first 20 years of his life (he has gone to considerable effort to ensure that he has experienced nothing new in the thirty years it has taken to compile the work), the Catalogue is an attempt to fully document the content of all the combined experience and knowledge contained within one human brain. As if that’s not a strange enough hook to keep you reading, his close friend Adam Last is about to rather messily remove Max’s head from his body, before informing the authorities of his death.

The hook is good enough then to grab you right from the start and, fortunately, the rest of the novel lives up to this intriguing and somewhat eccentric set-up. Like some precocious figure out of a Wes Anderson film, and not without a certain Holden Caulfield quality, Max has a rather conflicted relationship with the world around him, simultaneously fascinated and appalled by his experiences of life, being part of a rich eccentric family and spending the earliest years of his life in the 1960s in Africa. His lifework then is as much an attempt to impose or find a certain order to the world though a detailed study of the content of his brain. The meticulous cataloguing of every scrap of accumulated knowledge, descriptions of every person he has ever met, detailed records of every conversation he has ever had, every fact whether significant, trivial or entirely useless documented and cross-referenced, The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder could be very boring (and very long), but fortunately we have Adam as literary executor to pick out significant passages and comment on them.

What comes out of the book then is not some kind of Proustian discourse on memory – although in passing there are inevitably some interesting light-hearted philosophical observations on the nature of Max’s experiment – as much as a clever, entertaining and thoughtful look at the nature of life being merely a summary of one’s experiences while questioning whether there isn’t something more to it all. Inevitably, any attempt to categorise or answer those questions is going to involve a certain sense of closing in on oneself, and The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder isn’t immune to the same sense of inward-looking missing-the-wood-for-the-trees as Max’s experiment. For such a bold premise however, the novel is exceptionally well-written, entertaining and involving, so that even though you know that it's not going to go anywhere other than where it starts out – which is appropriate considering the context – it manages to bring these odd characters and their friendship to life in way that is ultimately quite touching.