Fiction, by its nature, relies on a rather strange conceit. An author tells a story that never happened, about people who never existed, doing things they never did, and the reader accepts the illusion as reality. Should either participant betray this unspoken contract, the entire edifice crumbles. It pains me to say that Richard Ayoade, in his debut novel, has done so, leaving the house he’s built razed to the ground.
I’ve always enjoyed Ayoade’s work as an actor, comedian, and television host, so expected to like this book, which tells the story of a supposed playwright, film-makers and poet who enjoyed a period of prolific creativity between 1960 and 1976 before descending into silence. “What happened?” the novel asks.
The mistake Ayoade makes, however, is placing himself firmly within the narrative. It begins when he’s a teenager browsing in a bookshop, only to discover Hughes’s The Two-Hander Trilogy. That the author photograph is his Doppelgänger sparks his interest and ultimately leads him to making a documentary about his career, interviewing past collaborators, wives, lovers and friends.
However, as Hughes is a fictional construct and Ayoade is a real-life human being, suspension of disbelief proves impossible.
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That said, Ayoade is very witty. He remarks about being 16 years old – “and, by that stage, had only written one or two big theatrical works” – which made me laugh aloud. But the cleverness of the writing only serves to point out the futility of the enterprise. “Who would read a screenplay, let alone a screenplay, of an unfinished film?” he asks of one of Hughes’s unmade works, ignoring the fact that he’s written a book about a man who never existed and is inviting us to sample context-free excerpts from his fabricated work.
In 1998, William Boyd tried something similar, publishing an imaginary biography of an American artist, Nat Tate, as a hoax but in those pre-internet times, it was rather easier to do. If The Unfinished Harauld Hughes is meant to fool us, it doesn’t. If it’s meant as a joke, then the reader is left feeling the joke is on us. I suspect Ayoade could write a work of comic brilliance, and I’d look forward to reading it. But, sadly, this isn’t it.
