‘The Unfinished Harauld Hughes’ by Richard Ayoade     (2024) – 182 pages

The novel ‘The Unfinished Harauld Hughes’ begins with the funeral of Harauld Hughes, noted English playwright, screenwriter, and poet. The ostensible writer of this story wants to produce a documentary on Harauld Hughes. Elsewhere this novel has been described as “Pinteresque” since apparently there are many parallels between the fictional life of Harauld Hughes and the real life of Nobel Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and sometime poet Harold Pinter. I did not know much about Harold Pinter until I read the Wikipedia biography of him just now,

What we get in this novel is a supposedly comic pastiche of various people relating their experiences with Harauld Hughes as the would-be documentary maker interviews them. His first wife Felicity Stoat who was an actress in his early plays and later a screen actress has already died. His second wife is Lady Lovilocke.

“She the daughter of an aristocrat, and Hughes a man of mixed ancestry, his wild hair, ‘born in Wales no less’.”

The novel also includes lines from Hughes’ plays and poems. The problem with including these quoted excerpts is that the reader doesn’t know if the lines are written as intentionally bad to be part of the parody. I did not find any lines in the poems particularly meaningful.

Occasionally the humor in the novel worked for me, especially on the quite humorous asides:

“The next time I saw Harauld was six years later, at a poetry recital in honor of some of the poems T. S. Eliot thought of writing, but ultimately decided not to.”

Anyhow, after Harauld Hughes left his first wife and took up with Lady Lovilocke, he gave up stage play writing and switched to the more lucrative screenwriting.

“Hughes’s marriage to Stoat which lasted from 1953 until its official dissolution in 1980, was unhappy, distant, and creatively productive; his marriage to Lady Lovilocke was happy, close, and seemed to put his creativity into endless abeyance.”

A few years after hooking up with Lady Lovilocke, Hughes takes on the task of writing a screenplay for a movie called ‘O Bedlam O Bedlam!’. Apparently the movie had a ridiculous plot for a serious artist and never gets made and virtually ends Hughes’ career as a writer.

There is talk of the differences between movies and stage plays:

“In the cinema all seats cost the same, more or less – sometimes it’s a few quid more for extra leg room – but one expects a comparable experience throughout the auditorium. Different story in theatre. It can sometimes cost ten times as much to sit near the front as compared to the cheap seats in the balcony. And that’s because it’s worth it.”

And there are insights into art itself:

“And what else is art but an attempt at high quality thought? But even to make such an assertion is to open oneself up to the derision of imbeciles.”

Overall, I found some of the lines in the novel quite funny and some of the insights clever, but ultimately the lines from the poems and from the stage plays of Harauld Hughes did not really speak directly to me, so I failed to see why anyone would consider him a literary genius.

Grade:     B