You have to love a good literary hoax – Ern Malley, JT LeRoy – but I am loath to put Richard Ayoade’s The Unfinished Harauld Hughes into that pigeonhole. He’s not trying to deceive. At least, I hope he doesn’t think he is, even if the publicity material likes to play along. It’s more a parody of a hoax.
This is a novel purporting to be an account of Ayoade’s finding of, and attempt to make a documentary of, the life of his mysterious subject, an Albee/Pinteresque mid-century playwright, “one of the first writers-in-residence at Costa Coffee, albeit in an unofficial capacity”.
The narrative takes itself only marginally more seriously than the ludicrous 80s horror writer Garth Marenghi, which Ayoade helped to create as co-writer for the cult, now largely forgotten, 2004 spoof television series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.
Being written by Ayoade, a multitalented actor, film-maker and comedian, much is promised. The set-up: while patronising a second-hand bookshop Ayoade discovers the work of long-forgotten Hughes and is attracted by the playwright’s physical resemblance to himself and similar propensity for brutal, unvarnished cynicism.
Ayoade, little camera in hand, resolves to make a documentary about Hughes, who we learn was born in Cardiff in 1931, after which “his mother sent him to London to fend for himself”. He then wrote a trilogy of plays called Platform, Table and Shunt, quit like Salinger in the early 1970s, and died whiskey-sodden and unknown in 2006, his last project being a film called O Bedlam! O Bedlam! that was never released.
The joke is that Ayoade is frequently talking about himself and taking the piss out of his industry. In theory, this sounds like a good time. The eye-rolling, dated pretentiousness is deliberate. But you can’t do irony when it’s ironic to do so. The problem is that Ayoade writes like his on-screen delivery. The dry, nerdy, recherché rambling bits, social awkwardness, throwaway non sequiturs, blunt sarcasm and deadpan affectation is hilarious on The IT Crowd, Travel Man and any Jimmy Carr-hosted panel show but does not translate well to the page.
That’s probably because there’s no one to play the straight man. Ayoade’s shtick is to perform boredom for a middle-brow BBC4 audience, but in book form it stops feeling like a shtick and just starts feeling boring. About a third of the way in, it takes on the monotony of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole – a one-note formula padded out with self-parodying pastiches that barely sustains itself over 182 pages.
Indeed, the wide margins, bullet point dialogues and excessive paragraph spacing suggest something that was never meant to be a novel. More likely, its genesis lay in a Spinal Tap-like mockumentary pitch, which would have been much more entertaining.
Ayoade is a clever man, a one-time president of the Footlights troupe at Cambridge, studied law and is well read enough to identify the clichés he’s parodying. Unfortunately, they were superficial clichés to begin with, and while bookish, Ayoade is neither literary enough nor old enough to provide the authenticity and affection a parody like this requires.
Most frustratingly, we never learn what is so amazing about Hughes’ plays. Because his enduring theme is “loss”. Ha ha. There are some genuine laughs, but if there are no stakes, why bother?
The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, by Richard Ayoade (Faber, $36.99), is out now.
