Tale's rambling path part of its appeal

Mr Toppit by Charles Elton. Photo / Supplied

If there is a key to understanding why this first novel is so rambling and uneven, it would lie in the fact that it took the author many years to write.

Long incubation has lent the novel some very real strengths - and also some grave weaknesses. In its favour are the richly textured, complex characters, particularly the women.

Overweight American Laura, whose empty life is suddenly swollen to Oprah Winfrey proportions, is a potent mix of extreme generosity and malignant ambition.

Eccentric, upper-class and alcoholic Martha, widow of massively successful children's author Arthur Hayman, is as full-blooded and alarming as her spoilt, drug-addled, jet-setting daughter Rachel. Mother and sister to the main character Luke, the reader shares his pained amusement at their antics and follies.

Well-educated and wise-beyond-his-years, Luke Hayman is 18 for the duration of the tale. He is burdened by his father's success and not just in the usual way that sons of prominent men are. His father used a close approximation of Luke's name for the main character in his blockbuster series "The Hayseed Chronicles", which is of Harry Potter dimensions worldwide.

All his life Luke has had to deal with readers fawning on him, a la Christopher Robin Milne. The novel cleverly articulates the feeding frenzy and spin-offs that come about from such publishing phenomenon - and interestingly, was mostly written before the boy wizard appeared.

Voldemort and the eponymous Mr Toppit are similar too, in their evil intentions. Whereas Voldemort is a shape-shifter, no one has ever seen Mr Toppit, who inhabits the Darkwood behind Luke Hayseed's house. There really is a wood behind the house in which Luke and Rachel grew up - which was their happy playground, not at all the scary forest of their father's books. Elton spent a period of his life as a literary agent, so his diatribes about publishers are heartfelt.

Halfway through the book, after Arthur's death and the feeding frenzy has begun, there is a cri-de-coeur against publishers acting as literary agents, ending, "If Arthur had chosen to employ a literary agent, the terms would have been far more favourable to him."

The book may also bristle with London publishing in-jokes, but they are escaped from this distance. There are other casualties of the publishing world, in particular Lila, the now elderly German illustrator of the chronicles, but it's difficult to empathise with her because she is almost a caricature, with her walking frame and thick-skinned neediness.

There are other contemporaries of elderly Arthur, who dies in the first few pages of the book, and for the most part they are sensitively and finely drawn.

Before he wrote the books, Arthur worked as a film editor - which gives Elton plenty of scope for some interesting historical observations of the film industry on either side of the Atlantic.

"Mr Toppit" has a large cast of characters and through them Elton uses "The Hayseed Chronicles" phenomenon - the books, the films, the television programmes, the fallout - as an entertaining (though long-winded) way to explore the universal theme of parenthood.

Martha and Rachel are as dysfunctional a mother and daughter as could be imagined, while Rachel's relationship with her father was distant and unfulfilled. His worst crime was not giving her a character in the chronicles - Rachel envies Luke his unwanted fame.

The sections set in England are more tightly written than the flabby and rambling LA chapters, which could have done with some sharp editing. This end of the story reads like story lines for a television series, all action and no reflection. Mr Toppit would, in fact, make marvellous television.

The episodic nature of the story would break neatly into smaller story arcs and the slight resolution of the central mystery at the end would not rankle as much as it does in book form.

Mr Toppit
By Charles Elton (Viking $37)

* Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.