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.
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