The Unfinished Harauld Hughes

by Richard Ayoade

Richard Ayoade's fictional quest to rescue Harauld
Hughes - the almost mythical mid-century playwright -
from obscurity.

The gifted filmmaker, corduroy activist and amateur dentist, Richard Ayoade, first chanced upon a copy of The Two-Hander Trilogy by Harauld Hughes in a second-hand bookshop. At first startled by his uncanny resemblance to the author’s photo, he opened the volume and was electrified. Terse, aggressive, and elliptical, what was true of Ayoade was also true of Hughes’s writing, which encompassed stage, screen, and some of the shortest poems ever published.


 Ayoade embarked on a documentary, The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, to understand the unfathomable collapse of Hughes’s final film O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, taking us deep inside the most furious British writer since the Boer War.


 This is the story of the story of that quest.

Genres: Fiction, Audiobook, Comedy, Humor, Contemporary, Literature, Novels

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Richard Ellef Ayoade is a British comedian, film director, screenwriter, television presenter, actor, and author best known for his role as the socially awkward IT technician Maurice Moss in Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd, for which he won the 2014 BAFTA for Best Male Comedy Performance.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not a big ‘books by comedians’ person, and may be an outlier in picking this up having not read any of Ayoade’s others, although I like him as an actor and presenter. I just found the premise – Ayoade sets out to make a documentary about an enigmatic (fictitious) playwright – impossible to resist. It’s daft but well-written, wry rather than laugh-out-loud funny. I loved the format, which includes interviews, article excerpts and dialogue from Hughes’ gnomic plays alongside a narrative of the documentary’s inevitable collapse into chaos. I had fun!

[Tom Mooney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, strange, and largely pointless. Kudos to Ayoade because this must have taken so much time and effort to construct (he's also publishing much of the fictional Hughes's work, I assume all written by himself).

[Emily B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable and unlike anything else I have read

[Miles Isham · Rating 3 out of 5]

My goodwill towards Richard Ayoade is enormous, he’s one of my favourite people. I really like the cover of this book. The inside bits not so much. Which is not to say that it isn’t well written or that there aren’t a couple of laughs, it just feels like Ayoade would rather have given us a serious book but chickened out. There were lengthy sections of this where I forgot it was supposed to be satirical. There were also lengthy sections where I forgot which character was talking. I think it’s time for Richard to move on and say what he really wants to say and this isn’t it.

[autumn ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i love richard ayoade but this was a little mid i fear

[libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

potentially the most extra book to ever be written

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great, crazy idea for fans of Richard Ayoade's style. The audio book is read by him and others (like Steve Merchant and David Mitchell) so it is even more entertaining.

If you have never read him, do not start with this book. It will make no sense why this is actually funny.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely pointless and absurd. I loved it.

[Philippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is a slightly odd concept. but, to paraphrase a conversation between the director and the author,

— Who would read a book about a fake documentary, let alone an unfinished fake documentary about an author who is not real?

— I would!



so, in a nutshell, it was very enjoyable. I really like Richard Ayoade's humour, and I think his skills as a writer and director really pull this together. he manages to balance comedy with intrigue across a range of mediums. each character is carefully constructed and unique, with great dry humour. admittedly, when I somehow missed the memo for the first 50 odd pages about both the documentary and Harauld Hughes being fabricated, but if anything that probably added to the conceptual chaos of it all.

also, i don't care if she's not real: lady Lovilocke is my new icon.

she was, as she put it, a woman with a title, idyllic estate, wealth, a thriving career and a wealthy older husband with deep pockets and rapidly declining wealth.

she also manages to correct Haraulds grammar after he confesses his love ("you're the only attractive woman I've met who I couldn't crush intellectually " "it's not who, harauld, its whom") and has many a great quote ("I think worrying about money is a way of rejecting the present and, of course, god")

[Sami · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. i need to press richard ayoade between two microscope slides and study him for hours. made me laugh out loud on the train multiple times. and surprisingly touching in places.

[Chandru · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF
Could see this maybe working well in an Extras / Office type mockumentary but did not work great here. Felt like it was trying to legitimise the source material so much it became a very bland affair and really wasn’t many funny parts.
Gave up around the halfway mark but lost interest a lot earlier

[Lydia Tinsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

We need more like Richard Ayoade in the world - both in comedy aspects as well as writing.

[Debbi Barton · Rating 3 out of 5]

One word- BONKERS

[Andrea InCoorparoo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really like Richard Ayoade as actor and TV presenter. I was disappointed by this book. It felt like a chore to read. There were funny moments, but they repeated, and went on and on and around again.

[Svea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listened to the audio book for this, 75% because it features music by Alex Turner and 25% because I've read Richard Ayoade before and enjoyed his style. I think I prefer him on TV or in written form though, because while the audio production was good, I found myself drifting off a few times. Overall a cool and fun and nice experience though!

[ollie pulsford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre, fun, I was grinning whilst reading a lot of this. A book, partially written as a play, about a playwright/screenwriter attempting to unearth the unfinished screenplay of a fictitious playwright/screenwriter. Somewhat pointless but nevertheless enjoyable. A few really great lines and quirky characters push it from a 3 to a 4.

[Alex Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

As one of the experts interviewed for this book rightly points out, It’s strange that the author would devote so much time and energy devoted to pointless hypothesizing about this mostly and justly forgotten playwright decades after his welcome demise.
Bedlam is like the Day the Clown Laughed or that unfinished Orson Welles movie—more interesting as a hypothetical than a reality

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Richard Ayoade and this book did not disappoint. Maybe not as funny as his other books but the concept is amazing.

[k · Rating 3 out of 5]

“champagne isn’t drinking. champagne is what you drink before the real drinking begins.”

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often found myself laughing out loud—sometimes having to stop and take a rest—thanks to the well-placed, deadpan humor. Just what I needed.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two words: utterly bonkers

[Louis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun satire piece about the creation of a documentary centred on the puzzling (and fictional) playwrite Harauld Hughes.

It’s funny, at points really funny, but it does go on a bit.

Might read more of Ayoade’s books as I am a fan of his wit

[Francis Pellow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the star studded audiobook which got me through the sections when I didn’t catch the allusions. clever and playful. It was good fun.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars rounded up solely for the concept of this book. I loved the idea of what this could be, and I love the world both within and without the physical book itself that Ayoade has created. But alas… writing fiction or a novel is not this man’s strength. There were times where you could hear his voice and humour which was nice, but mostly this was just a painful flat ramble with no character depth, a really dull plot, and a poorly executed idea. So much potential led to so much disappointment.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I AM GOBSMACKED, to use a British phrase, that the typically staid New York Review of Books let Richard Ayoade write a first-person appreciation (as the fictional "Chloë Clifton-Wright") of the British playwright and screenwriter Harauld Hughes (also fictional). I imagine this is the NYRB's indirect way of endorsing Ayoade's The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a novel that masquerades as a journal about the making of a documentary film about Hughes. "Clifton-Wright" dismisses The Unfinished Harauld Hughes in a curt footnote.

Not only has the august NYRB been persuaded to participate in Ayoade's guerrilla campaign of creating an aura of reality around his fictional playwright and screenwriter, but the just as august Faber and Faber publishing house has been so persuaded as well, for they agreed to place ads for Harauld Hughes's (fictional) books on the back cover and back pages of Ayoade's novel.

The novel does not quite match the ingenuity of the guerrilla campaign, in my opinion, but is nonetheless hilarious and entertaining in a Waugh-ian vein. Ayoade, as the planned documentary's presenter, drags the filmmaking crew from one interviewee to another, each more prickly and uncooperative than the last. The El Dorado of the documentary is to figure out what Hughes's final, unfilmed screenplay, O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, was about, but just as Ayoade is winning near the goal...well, no spoilers.

Ayoade seems to be a well-known and popular television presence in the UK, which means we might start seeing more of him here. I hope it works out better than it did with Russell Brand. Judging from novel, it is bound to do so.

[Iain Lachlainn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel about a playwright, is presented as an investigation by the author. As you’d expect from Richard Ayoade, it is deadpan and awkward, bringing wit, humour and a slice of surrealism to the mundane, or in this case, the very unremarkable life and works of the titular character.

The book itself is structured like a script, and with the audio version voiced by sometime collaborators of Ayoade (including Noel Fielding and David Mitchell with musical interludes by Arctic Monkey’s Alex Turner) it is no surprise that this feels like a radio play rather than a novel.

Ayoade investigates the unanswered questions of the life of Harauld Hughes, and the plot rolls along nicely, and I enjoyed the light, gentle humour. If you are a fan of Ayoade then you’ll enjoy this.

[Libby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Book club book…. I spent the first half thinking it was non fiction and not being interested because I hadn’t heard of Harauld Hughes. Then I realised it was fiction and wasn’t interested because it was so overdone and waffle-y. Didn’t know how it was supposed to be funny. Had to read quick to avoid a reading slump

[Mr Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a great read. And not really that funny either frustratingly.

[Jake Parkman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The culmination of ayode's previous works wrapped up in a special bundle of his own

[Eva Decheiver · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

3.5 loved the audiobook