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The 'rag-bag' chronicle

13.11.08 Benedicte Page

Charles Elton's début novel Mr Toppit, which Viking is set to publish with much fanfare in February, has a premise full of familiar resonances for those who work in the book world.

Mr Toppit is about a series of children's books, The Hayseed Chronicles written by Arthur Hayman, which start out as a modest success in the UK, but which later become a roaring sensation across America and beyond, offering merchandising opportunities, a film and spin-offs galore.

The books feature Hayman's son Luke as the main character, and he must grow up in the glare of this unasked-for celebrity. They also feature Mr Toppit, an enigmatic figure who appears only once in The Hayseed Chronicles, yet who exercises some unspecified but sinister power over all the other characters in the books. Indeed, Mr Toppit's dark power seems to extend beyond the novels and into the lives of Arthur Hayman and his family, particularly after Hayman dies suddenly in a traffic accident. 

Elton, who before he became a television producer worked as a book designer and then as an agent at Curtis Brown, says he began the novel long before the Harry Potter phenomenon took off, working in an on-off fashion while developing his TV projects. "I began writing it before my daughter was born and she's now 15."

He was inspired partly, he says, by the situation of Christopher Robin Milne, son of A A Milne and boy hero of the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Elton had represented the film rights of A A Milne's estate while at Curtis Brown. Famously, Christopher Robin found co-existing with his literary incarnation a life-long burden. "That was the image that stayed in my head, of a child being used as the hero of his father's children's books, and being world famous, and everybody thinking it's him—but it isn't him," says Elton.

Elton seems rather apologetic about becoming a novelist. He plonks a copy of James Wood's How Fiction Works down on the table and says: "I haven't read it and I'm sure my book is full of things you shouldn't really do." Instead he calls Mr Toppit an "indulgent rag-bag" of the things that interest him, and of events, sometimes only lightly disguised —his mother was killed in a traffic accident very like the one that kills Arthur Hayman in the novel. But the underlying theme of the book is how our lives are often shaped by family secrets in ways we don't understand, as Luke and his sister Rachel struggle with the legacy of their father's books and events which took place even before they were born.

A tantalising feature of Mr Toppit is the hints Elton scatters throughout about the content of The Hayseed Chronicles. So real do the books seem that you long to read them. "I think Penguin thought that I had originally written masses of stuff for the children's books and just picked out the tip of the iceberg, but I didn't, I never wrote any more than what is there now," says Elton, looking rather pleased. "Because I've worked in films, the one thing I knew in an instinctive way was that the less I put in the more enigmatic it would be. It was purely technical."

Penguin asked Elton to write actual blurbs for each of the imaginary Hayseed books, as a marketing tool. "I've written enough blurbs in my time so I know how they go—-‘Never have the stakes been higher . . .'—so I wrote them, and it was very weird. It felt as though somewhere inside me these weird kids' books exist, if I could be bothered to get them out—which I can't."

Authors Benedicte Page Viking Profile Charles Elton

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