The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder

In July 1975, 21-year-old Maximilian Ponder decides to embark on a curious project. He will write down absolutely everything he can remember in an attempt to create an exhaustive index of his brain. In order to do this, he must retreat from the world so as not to pollute his remembered thoughts with any new ones. Over thirty years later, Max lies dead on a table. His best friend and personal assistant throughout this project, Adam Last, sits by the dead man's side surrounded by the thousands of notebooks cataloguing Max's memories. While Adam is left with one last macabre duty to perform before the police arrive, the tale of Max's life and his unusual project, entitled The Catalogue, begin to emerge.

The premise of this novel is a fascinating one. Is it really possible to record everything that we know? Ironmonger in this intriguing and highly entertaining debut novel certainly tries to find out, using Adam as the narrator of Max's story interspersed with extracts from The Catalogue. It is a life that among other things records a childhood spent at a boarding school in Africa, a trip to a leper colony, a lake hidden by flies, a river full of the bodies of dead soldiers, before ending up in thirty years of seclusion in a set of rooms at Max's family home in Buckinghamshire.

At a time when humanity is transferring more and more of its knowledge onto hard drives and into hyper-space, this novel forces the reader to reflect on the subjectivity and truth of memory, the value of knowledge and the philosophy of who we really are. Heady subjects perhaps, but Ironmonger's wit and intelligence coupled with engaging anecdotes and eccentric characters keep the reader enthralled right to the very end.