Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time

The Tooting family spend the first chapter of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time stuck in a swamp, in a vintage green car, being sniffed by a Tyrannosaurus rex.

What happens

Frank Cottrell Boyce writes that dinosaur beautifully. Mud and twigs caught in the folds of its skin. Nostrils like a pair of wet bin lids. An eye that is only a tiny twitchy rivet, and that is looking straight at you. Lucy, who is fifteen and dresses entirely in black, uses the moment to explain the scientific debate about whether the creature is a predator or a scavenger, because the answer decides whether the family lives.

"On balance," she says, "I'm going to say predator."

This is the second book about the Tootings and their car, and it doesn't start from scratch. Chitty is already rebuilt and flying, Dad has already discovered what the Chronojuster handle does, and there's a supervillain called Tiny Jack who has already tried something horrible involving piranhas. None of that stops a new reader. It's all folded back in within a few chapters, and the dinosaur doesn't need any backstory.

What makes the book sing is the car. Chitty isn't driven so much as consulted. She sounds her 1921 Klaxon at exactly the right moment. She flicks her headlights on full beam to convince a tyrannosaur that she might be a comet. The joke Cottrell Boyce keeps returning to is what the dinosaurs make of all this, and it's told from inside their heads, which is where the best laughs in the book live.

Then the Chronojuster gets pushed forward and the family watch the entire history of the world roll past the windscreen. The Ice Age goes by like a spring shower and leaves frost on the bonnet. It's showing off, and it's lovely.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The dinosaur chapters are genuinely tense and not brief. A toddler wanders back towards thirteen hungry tyrannosaurs and is nearly eaten several times, which is played for laughs but is still a small child in a mouth. The creatures bite bloody chunks out of one another. Later the family learn that the villain and his nanny are sitting in their house, going through their things, waiting for them to come home, which is its own quieter kind of horrible.

The family are the reason to stay. Dad announces "the word today" and then says something ridiculous. Mum is braver than all of them. Jem worries. Lucy narrates the apocalypse with obvious enjoyment. Little Harry wants only to see a dinosaur and cannot understand why everybody keeps running the wrong way.

What to read next

If your reader wants to know how an ordinary family from Basildon ended up with the most famous car in the world, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again is in the library. It starts with a camper van, a second-hand engine and a dad with Big News.