'Mr Toppit' - A parody of posthumous fame

MR. TOPPIT, by Charles Elton. Other Press, 400 pp., $15.95 paper.

"Mr. Toppit," the debut novel of British literary agent and television producer Charles Elton, arrives in the United States after a run on the U.K. bestseller list last year. A cultural satire encompassing a Harry Potter-esque literary empire, a "Royal Tenenbaums"-style dysfunctional family and an Oprah-type media figure, the book is both funny and sad.

The narrator is Luke Hayman, whose father, Arthur Hayman, wrote a series of children's books called "The Hayseed Chronicles." The main character is a boy named Luke, a fact which has given the real Luke a stone in his shoe for most of his life. (The setup recalls a memoir published by Christopher Milne, son of A.A., about the misery of being the model for Christopher Robin.) Missing from the "Hayseed" oeuvre is any character modeled on Luke's sister, Rachel, causing her an equal and opposite woe. As her gay best friend, Claude, puts it, "Rachel has drug dealers the way other people have accountants or dentists."

The "Hayseed" books are little known in 1981, when Arthur is killed by a cement truck while crossing a London street. (The author's mother was killed in the same way when he was working on the novel.) As Arthur lies in extremis, an obese and very weird American tourist named Laurie Clow kneels by his side and shares his last moments. She attaches herself to the bereaved Hayman family - Luke is 13 and Rachel 17 at this point - and becomes a somewhat unwelcome participant in the funeral activities. When she eventually returns to California, Laurie reads from the "Chronicles" on her local radio show. In a slow domino effect, they emerge from obscurity and become a gigantic international publishing phenomenon, with merch galore - a board game, PlayStation game, Royal Doulton cereal bowl set, eggcups, figurines and clothing. Laurie rides this wave to media stardom.

The second part of "Mr. Toppit" skips ahead five years and moves to Los Angeles, where Luke goes to live at Laurie's compound the summer before college. There he runs into many familiar types: dopey stoner boy, evangelist slut, coked-up teen actor, dominatrix German personal assistant. The California portion of the novel feels slow and a bit less original than the U.K. section, and leaves behind for too long a pair of favorite characters: Luke's brittle, vodka-swilling mother and endearing, manic-depressive Rachel.

But the denouement reunites the Haymans at their country estate, where no amount of security can stop "Hayseed" fans from trespassing, spray-painting graffiti and picnicking in the surrounding forest, which they believe is the Darkwood of the books. "And out of the Darkwood Mr. Toppit comes, and he comes not for you, or for me, but for all of us" is the most famous and hotly debated line of the "Chronicles." Here, Mr. Toppit seems incarnate in the wave of chaos and darkness that sweeps up the characters at the end of the book. One way or another, I hated to see them go.