The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade review – comic novel or conceptual art project? | Fiction

The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is one thing like a South Financial institution Present Home of Leaves: it’s the narrative of the making of a documentary that by no means will get made, a couple of film that additionally by no means received made. Its protagonist-narrator is Richard Ayoade, an alter ego of the creator of the guide, Richard Ayoade. He’s in the hunt for an alter ego of his personal – or, at the very least, a doppelganger.

The late Harauld Hughes – creator of era-defining performs with titles comparable to Platform, Desk, Roast, Roost, Immediate, Flight, Shunt and Dependence, and subsequently a hack screenwriter – is Ayoade’s white whale. It so occurs that the playwright’s creator {photograph} appears extraordinarily like Richard Ayoade, besides that Hughes “wore the type of glasses I’d seek for, in useless, from that second on”.

Ayoade’s curiosity in Hughes, kindled by the possibility likeness, develops right into a deep reverence: “Harauld Hughes, to my thoughts, is drama.” Now, for sheer love of Hughes (he reproaches himself, infrequently, that he ought to by no means have agreed to make this documentary), Ayoade is filming an arts programme to be known as The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, through which he trundles round interviewing such associates of the late playwright as will agree to speak, and goes in quest of a duplicate of O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, Hughes’s final, misplaced movie. The footage is outwardly in a Swiss financial institution vault someplace, and no one who is aware of about it’s ready to say something that makes a lick of sense.

What suggestions this from being a comic book novel into one thing extra like a conceptual artwork challenge is that, foolishly or heroically, Ayoade has really written the whole works of Harauld Hughes, in three volumes – 4 Movies, Performs Prose Items Poetry and The Fashions Trilogy – launched, apparently, as restricted editions, alongside the novel. So now you can learn and even carry out Platform, or The Terrible Girl from Area. They arrive with straight-faced prefaces, timelines, deleted scenes, important essays, the lot. That’s a level of dedication to world-building George RR Martin might study from.

The fictional Hughes has very far more than a dollop in him of Harold Pinter. He’s offended and shouty (“essentially the most livid British author because the Boer struggle”), he’s well-known for his dramatic pauses, he has a roughish East Finish background, and he has a troubled first spouse whom he leaves for a little bit of posh (if that’s not too disrespectful an epithet for the many-splendoured Woman Antonia Fraser or, on this case, Woman Virginia Lovilocke). However there are variations, too. For Pinter’s fabled love of cricket, substitute a fierce curiosity in badminton.

Why badminton? The identical cause, I believe, why “Harauld”, and why the facial likeness between Ayoade and his topic. As a result of it’s humorous and a bit offbeat and random, and why not? Ayoade’s guide is stuffed with such touches of gentle absurdity. Its comedian tenor is a component satirical and half pure whimsy, and it’s very beguiling.

Within the satirical mode, as he travels from interview to interview with pretentious Director Dan, Tony Digital camera and a stoner soundman known as Wiggsy, Ayoade is excellently droll on the making of presenter-led telly “docs” (it bugs our hero that Dan calls them that, however telly individuals undeniably do). For Dan’s functions, naturally, Ayoade is on a journey. Dan’s approach of protecting the sense of a journey is to indicate a journey, bookended by somebody saying they’re about to go on a journey and/or have simply been on a journey, all the whereas observing a shifting panorama by way of a reflective floor, underpinned by a voiceover about being on a journey. His dedication to literalism is sort of inspiring.

The journey, it’s most likely not an excessive amount of of a spoiler to disclose, goes nowhere. As tempers fray, interviewees drop out or die unexpectedly, and promising leads grow to be lifeless ends, Tony Digital camera rants: “How are you meant to journey by way of the lifetime of a author. They don’t do something – they don’t struggle wars or make legal guidelines or save lives, they simply make shit up!”

But it surely’s not the journey. It’s the buddies we make alongside the way in which, proper? These mates embody the excellently imperious Woman Virginia, Hughes’s East Finish associates (who’ve about them greater than a contact of Monty Python’s Piranha Brothers), a pompous theatre critic and, in fact, the splenetic Hughes himself. Ayoade’s quietly clever, low-key wit, funnelled by way of his hangdog narrator, makes this a journey price taking.

The Unfinished Harauld Hughes by Richard Ayoade is revealed by Faber (£16.99). To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply fees could apply.