It would be easy to mistake Richard Ayoade’s fourth book for a nonfiction work about Harauld Hughes, “one of the UK’s most garlanded playwrights”. After all, it is made to look that way. The biography page features a description of Ayoade’s career so far – that he is best known as a comedian and actor, for his roles in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The IT Crowd ; that he also wrote and directed the 2010 coming-of-age film Submarine .
Following this, we have a similar paragraph on Hughes, although here you may suspect this is farce. After his birth in 1931, it states, “his mother sent him to London to fend for himself”. On the back cover, praise from comedians Tim Key and David Baddiel is followed by a not wholly complimentary endorsement from a “Lady Virginia Lovilocke”.
Surely, you think, that is not a real name? Of course it isn’t. This is a parody, in which a character who is unnamed, but more or less Richard Ayoade, tells of his attempt to make a documentary film about Harauld Hughes – who is entirely Ayoade’s creation. The Ayoade of the novel, which is set in and around contemporary London, is first drawn to Hughes in a second-hand bookshop, when he sees a picture of Hughes on the back cover of a trilogy of his plays.
“I had a double. Even in profile, the resemblance was remarkable. It was me.
” Once he opens the book and reads the names of the plays – “ Platform. Table. Shunt.
” – he is transfixed. “Aggressive, terse, mysterious.