mclapply user time larger than elapsed time

mclapply user time larger than elapsed time

I am trying to use mclapply function of the parallel package in R. The
function is assigning the values to sequence matrix by calculating log
likelihood distance - a CPU-intensive operation.
The resulting system.time values are confusing:
> system.time(mclapply(worksample,function(x){p_seqi_modj(x,worksample[[1]],c(1:17))}))
user system elapsed
29.339 1.242 18.581
I thought that elapsed means aggregated time (user+system). What does the
above result mean in this case and to what time should I orient myself? My
unparallelized version takes less in user time and much more in elapsed.