The Interesting Brain of J.W. Ironmonger

In an exclusive interview with the Virgin Book Blog, debut novelist J. W. Ironmonger talks about writing, the importance of accuracy with primate nomenclature, and the environmental horror of hotel toast…

Hi, John. We’re very excited to read The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder, which looks like a fairly off-the-wall title. It’s generally harder to publish eclectic literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction – was it a smooth journey to publication or did you face an uphill battle?

It did worry me that Maximilan’s might be too quirky a story, and too odd a title for publishers to take it seriously. When I finished my first draft of the novel, I was quite convinced that no one would ever want to read it. It sat unread on my computer hard-drive for almost three years. Then one day, on impulse, I showed it to my son. He read it, and persuaded me that I really ought to send it to an agent. Even then I found reasons to prevaricate. Another six months passed until finally, I plucked up the courage, found an agent on the internet and sent him the novel. No sooner had he read it, than the phone began to ring. It was astonishing. I had dizzying offers from half a dozen publishers in less than a week. I could hardly believe what was happening, it all happened so fast.

So for me, at least, it was a fairly smooth journey, endangered only by my own self doubt. I was very lucky to end up at Orion, who have been fantastic, and they really haven’t asked for many changes at all. They did change the title though. The original title was The Interesting Brain of Maximilian Ponder. (Apparently the word ‘interesting’ isn’t interesting enough.) I am happy with ‘notable’ though. It hints at ‘not able’ which is a tantalizing clue to Max’s damaged psyche.

Tell us about Maximilian Ponder, and what inspired his story…

The novel tells the story of a man who locks himself away on his twenty-first birthday, with the single-minded aim of cataloguing his entire brain. This should have been a straightforward, if unusual, postgraduate project, and Max’s plan was that it should have been finished in just three years. But his calculations go badly awry. In the end it takes him thirty years, and it costs him his life.

I started thinking about the story not long after the death of my father. I was struck (as I’m sure we all are when we lose somebody close) not just by the loss of my Dad, but by the loss of all his memories. Would it ever be possible, I wondered, for someone to write all their memories down? And what kind of person would do this? He (I knew it would have to be a ‘he’ – no woman would be so stupid) would need to be very smart, and very rich. He would have an eclectic store of memories to record. He would, I was sure, have an obsessive personality. I began to imagine the character of Max Ponder. At last, when I felt that I knew him enough, I sat down and typed out the first line on my computer.
I wrote, ‘My name is Maximilian Zygmer Quentin Kavadis John Cabwhill Teller. My name includes every letter of the Roman alphabet except for the letter ‘f’. My mother, it seems, had an aversion to ‘f’.’ To this day, I have no idea where that name came from. It just seemed to spring from the keyboard. I checked the alphabet claim and annoyingly there was no ‘p’ either. I spent a happy hour or so trying variations of names, and not liking any, before abandoning my writing for the day. I had written thirty three words of a novel and had stalled on a name for my principal character.

The next day I renamed Max Teller. He became Max Pinder for a while, until one day I mis-typed his name. The ‘o’ key is right next to the ‘i’ key on the keyboard, and I’m often a clumsy typist. So it was providence and bad typing that gave Max Ponder his name.

Who are/were your inspirations and influences as a writer? What novels have dazzled you?

I grew up in Nairobi in the sixties, reading almost anything I could lay my hand on, from science fiction to Dickens, from Agatha Christie to Portnoy’s Complaint. I think I was in my mid-twenties when I discovered The World According to Garp by John Irving. It is the story of a young man trying to find his voice as a writer. I challenge anyone to read this novel and not to come away inspired to write. Irving has a way of combining great storytelling with a very clear, rhythmic, almost poetic prose style. I still read and re-read Irving to remind myself what great prose should sound like. He has his thirteenth novel coming out this year, and I can’t wait.

If you were to ask me for a desert island book, I would take the collected short stories of Damon Runyon. It saddens me that Runyon is remembered only for inspiring Guys and Dolls. His tales of low-life New Yorkers in the depression of the nineteen thirties is so full of humour and pathos, and they feature so many unforgettable characters, that I can get to the final page and flick right back to the beginning. There aren’t many books that you can do that with – except for the adventures of Asterix the Gaul and I suspect these don’t count.

How long did it take you to write the book, and how different is the finished product compared to your earliest ideas?

I know the exact day when I started to write ‘Maximilian’ because I made it the day of Max’s death, Monday 27th June 2005. It took about two years to write, but I wasn’t especially conscientious. I have read that Hemmingway rarely wrote more than 350 words a day- which is barely a page of a modern novel. My average word rate must have been even smaller. Still, it is always surprising how those pages start to pile up once a novel gathers momentum.

I always knew how the story would end. What I didn’t know were the details of Max’s journey. I knew he would be traumatized in his childhood, but when I started the story, I had no idea how this would happen. I ended up borrowing some traumas from my own childhood, which wasn’t really part of the plan. I remember visiting a town called Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, when I was nine or ten years old. The town was effectively a leper colony. As we walked briskly around, trying to avoid the ministrations of begging lepers, I peered through a broken fence into a compound. It was the undertakers. I saw piles of bodies, all dead from leprosy, all awaiting coffins. I found myself giving Max this memory. It would be his first encounter with death.

Some of Max’s memories are his own, but many more were invented. I enjoyed giving him a history, a biography, for him to record in his catalogue. In the end, I think, the finished book was exactly what I had wanted to write. It just may not have been the book I set out to write.

We understand you’re very well-travelled. What is the day-job, and where has it taken you?

I’ve been very lucky to work in a job that has taken me around the world. I work for a software house, and look after international business opportunities, so I’ve seen much of Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.

Travel has always been a passion of mine anyway. A few years ago, a friend and I drove the Plymouth to Banjul Rally. It’s a down-market version of the Paris-Dakar Rally; the difference is that you must drive a car worth less than £100, and you can only spend £15 on doing it up. It was an incredible adventure, taking in eight countries, a minefield, three ferry crossings, and several hundred miles of off-road sand. We drove a 1988 Renault 5. None of the dashboard instruments worked, and a collision with a rock in the desert took out all of our gears except for third gear. We drove the last thousand miles in third, and we bent the car so badly in a ditch in Mauritania that none of the doors would properly close. We limped into Banjul feeling like heroes. We also raised almost £10,000 for an orphanage project in Sierra Leone, which was fantastic.

I travel fairly regularly to the GCC – perhaps half a dozen times a year, so it sometimes feels like a second home.

Tell us three things you simply can’t stand.

Don’t get me started…

I studied as a zoologist (and once even wrote a non-fiction book about zoos). I get unreasonably precious when anyone refers to chimpanzees, orang-utans, or gorillas as ‘monkeys’. You may think this trivial, but for me this has escalated into an irritant above any other. I will rail loudly against such offenders. I will correct them sternly: ‘They are not monkeys, they are apes!’ When a film like ‘Planet of the Apes’ comes out, I should be locked away for public safety. The number of headlines that read, ‘Monkey Business’ or ‘Monkeying Around,’ defies belief. Aargh!

I cannot stand those horrid devices some hotels provide for making toast at breakfast. You know the ones – they have a tortuously slow conveyor belt that converts your bread, after an intolerable wait, into warm bread. Put the slices around for a second toasting and they will emerge blackened. There is a cruel inevitability about these machines. Wander away to make a coffee and another guest will always steal your toast. They seem to use as much power as a Bessemer converter, and burn continuously for four hours, during which time they may warm up half a dozen slices. So they are an environmental menace, and they don’t even work! What was wrong with the good old fashioned pop up toaster? That’s what I want to know.

And on the subject of hotels, I want to start a name and shame campaign for hotels that charge eye watering sums for a room and then have the barefaced cheek to want to charge fifteen quid an hour for Wi-Fi access. We should boycott entire hotel chains that do this. Their names should be expunged from the public record, their hotels demolished, and photo-shopped out of all photographs, and it should be a crime to even suggest that these hotels might ever have existed, in recognition of their unconscionable greed.

Only three things! Well. Maybe that’s enough …

Lastly, are you hard at work on a second novel?

I just delivered the manuscript for a second novel to Orion this month. The title (unless they change it) is, The Coincidence Authority. This is the story of a man called Thomas Post, who studies coincidences. He is an authority. People will visit him with stories of coincidences in their lives, and Thomas can always explain these with the cold mathematics of chance. If you throw two dice, sometimes you will throw a double six, he will explain. There is no mystery about this. But then, quite by chance, he meets Azalea Lewis, a young woman whose coincidences seem to go off the scale. Azalea unsettles Thomas, and makes him question everything he had ever believed in. To sort it out, he must unravel the story of Azalea’s life. So it’s a story with embedded mysteries, some fundamental questions about the nature of the universe, and a love story to boot.

And now I’m hard at work on a third novel. But that must wait for another day.

The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder is available now from Virgin Megastores