Summary
Surround her with familiar things - straitjacket here under the Hayseed duvet and pillowcase, blast the excruciating "Luke 's Theme" down stereo headphones into her ears, force-feed her through a tube from the Hayseed cereal bowl and mug combo - and you probably couldn't kick-start her to save your life. Luke's tone in the opening chapter combines bossy heartlessness with a tendency to overdo the detail and although it seems similar at first to John Lanchester's Debt to Pleasure or Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal Luke is, disappointingly, a much nicer character than the sniping sociopaths in charge of those novels.
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Extract
Childhood's End
Childhood's end Mr Toppit Charles Elton Viking, 352pp, £12.99
Mr Toppit, a first novel by Charles Elton, begins with a huge piece of misdirection. The narrator is Luke Hayman, whose father Arthur wrote a series of c...See the full content of this document
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