Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

Notes:

There’s something of a market in classic sequels. William Horwood produced the excellent Tales of the Willows sequel series; there are several Treasure Island follow-ons; Return to the Hundred Acre Wood came out a couple of years ago; and there are others. Frank Cottrell Boyce has taken Ian Fleming’s magnificent, iconic flying car and given it a 21st-century makeover with a 21st-century family. A spirit of adventure and optimism drives the whole story forward from the father for whom every adversity is a cause of celebration for the opportunity it brings, down to little Harry who’s excited by everything he sees and is usually worth listening to.

Without its being in any way overdone, the sense of family is strong and central throughout this story. Jem might be a typical youngster, unimpressed by old-world entertainment, and Lucy might be a morbidly-obsessed teenage girl who spends all her time in her room, but both of them show talent, ingenuity and courage in their determination to keep things together. Nor are their parents ciphers; good-natured and bickering quietly over who's going to drive and where to go next, the whole family's a joy to see in action.

There's much witty and sometimes quite subtle humour. The explanation for the Bucklewing scrapyard is a sort of nod to the Horrible Histories book series. The amusing turn-around of teen-girl privacy into unexpected linguistic and other talents is a laugh especially when Lucy encounters her exact opposite number on Madagascar: Flora, daughter a local fisherman who suffers from seasickness.

It is an adventure, but the danger level never rises too high. There is a car-obsessed thief with a lethal managerie but the children and Chitty get the better of them. The family is arrested by the Paris gendarmerie when they unwittingly land on the Eiffel Tower but Mr Tooting passes it off as a grand romantic gesture for his wife (“I wanted her to wake up with Paris all around her”) and the French – police and public alike — are charmed. Mr & Mrs Tooting are tricked into riding around in a car which belonged to an ex-spy with plenty of enemies, but they become quite adept at car chases and are reunited with their children in a set-piece which may or may not have been an hommage to Ian Fleming’s other famous creation.

As they visit one place after another, they find pieces of the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Indeed, the car seems to have a mind of her own, refusing to move until the pieces have been found. At the end, the entire car has been replaced, with the interesting but unspoken ontological question of whether it is in fact the same car.

Enjoyable from beginning to end, this book takes a very slightly not-quite-ordinary family around the world in an extraordinary car with humour and grace. There’s a final chapter, too, which gives promise of a sequel which I will certainly be looking out for.