Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Forget the play. Forget the film. Forget, if you can, the songs. Read the book.

It's great.

And it's surprisingly innocent.

There's no ratcatcher here, and no children being snatched from their parents. Quite the opposite. As Frank Cottrell Boyce points out: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is "one of the very few stories in which the whole family goes off on the adventure – usually children have to be sent away to school or evacuated or bereaved or fall through a time vortex before an adventure can start."

So Chitty Chitty Bang Bang really is a book for all the family. And if you want more, Frank Cottrell Boyce has now written three sequels.

If you want a sample, you can read the first chapter of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again here.

Frank Cottrell Boyce

I have written before about Frank Cottrell Boyce, a fascinating author and all-round nice guy. (See here and here and here.)

One of his strengths is that he is difficult to pigeonhole: a homeschooling Catholic parent who used to write reviews for Living Marxism; a scriptwriter for Brookside and Coronation Street who has a D.Phil in 17th Century History; a co-creator of the Olympics opening ceremony who writes great children's books.

In this interview with The Guardian he makes all sorts of interesting points. I've picked out just a few:

In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the flying car with a mind of its own, he was presented with a readymade vehicle with which to attempt all these things. Compared with the highly personal ideas and experiences that lay behind previous books, the continuation of the Fleming brand looks baldly commercial. But there is charm and humour in Cottrell Boyce's two sequels (the original was published in three instalments: the plan is to copy this formula and call it a day). This is partly drawn from his pleasure in the fact that the original is that rare thing, an adventure story in which the parents are invited along.

"That would certainly never happen in Roald Dahl," he says. "The problem I had with Chitty is that people remember the movie, which is a Dahl movie [Dahl wrote the screenplay] … there's a supercar, a supervillain and lots of sexual perversity." The Fleming original, by contrast, is "very sweet".

and

Meanwhile Cottrell Boyce and his wife, now back in Liverpool, carried on having children. In all they have seven, aged between eight and 27, four boys and three girls. From his account it is a warm and close family, with the youngest children home-schooled mainly because their parents like having everyone together in the house, but also to shield them from the highly commercialised peer pressure Cottrell Boyce describes as "weaponised advertising". His view of celebrity culture magazines such as Closer borders on disgust.

and

"Being read to at school changed my life. I really became aware of that during the Olympics because we were all of us in that room drawing on stuff we'd read as children and none of it was stuff we were examined on, it wasn't anything measurable. It was stuff that people had shared with us that we went on to share. If you look at that ceremony and what was in it, it was a sense of wonderment in storytelling. We found we had this common heritage – Mary Poppins and so on."

and

Although he probably wouldn't say so, Cottrell Boyce is a writer with a clear moral purpose, who believes the whole point of books is to extend our imaginative reach, and give us pleasure in the process. Recently he has been reading stories by George Saunders, recommended by his adult sons, and the children's books of Rumer Godden with his youngest. 

and, finally, 

He says he is slow, prone to distractions, and when asked why he did something often names a person or a favour ("I'm very big on loyalty, very big on friendship maybe").

Frank Cottrell Boyce on "the great Catholic artist"

Frank Cottrell Boyce (of whom more here and here) recently wrote an article about his favourite Hitchcock film which contains this striking final paragraph:

"Hitchcock is the great Catholic artist, returning again and again to the themes of the fallen nature of creation. Sometimes – The Wrong Man,The Birds – this comes out as a bleakly thrilling feeling that everyone is guilty. In Notorious, however (and in Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, North by Northwest and Vertigo), it plays the opposite way – that the world is fallen and therefore the best are only different from the worst by the grace of God; that our worst failings are forgivable and repairable; and that no matter how compromised we are, we can – and must – love one another. It's the reason his great thrillers are also great love stories. It's the source of the power of that last shot – a hungover pietà – of Grant carrying Bergman out of the house of shadows and into the possibility of love."


Perhaps that's a question for some future exam paper: "Hitchcock is the great Catholic artist. Discuss."

Frank Cottrell Boyce on Newman

Frank Cottrell Boyce, the author of Millions among many other great children's books, gave a lecture last week on Newman. As you might expect from Cottrell Boyce, it was both witty and thought-provoking. You can download a PDF of the lecture or listen online. Both are worth doing.

'Millions' - Frank Cottrell Boyce

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a highly successful scriptwriter and children’s author who also just happens to be a committed Catholic. You can read the transcript of a wonderful interview he gave to the BBC here. Cottrell Boyce’s relentless enthusiasm for his faith comes across in spite of, or perhaps because of, the persistent attempts of the interviewer to find some sign of dissent to latch onto.

Millions (which was first conceived as a film directed by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame) is probably Cottrell Boyce’s most obviously Catholic book. Damian, the Year Five narrator, is obsessed with saints and sees them at regular intervals throughout the novel. Whether he is suffering from a religious mania as a result of his mother’s premature death or whether he simply has a childlike faith is never made explicit.

The saints he meets sometimes speak and behave as if they are extensions of Damian’s subconscious mind, which suggests the former interpretation, but, on the other hand, they do also guide and inspire him when he is faced with the book’s central ethical dilemma: what to do when thousands of pounds fall, almost literally, into his lap.

For this is what Millions is really about: the destructive power of money and how to cope with it. Damian may be an odd boy who is struggling to cope with the loss of his mother but he is also the one who, ultimately, manages to do the right thing when faced with this wholly unexpected windfall.

Millions is not a book to be taken too seriously - some of the characters are caricatures in the best Dickensian tradition and some of the basic premises, like the Euro switchover day, are barely credible – but that doesn't really matter because it's meant to be funny.

The New Atheists would have us believe that Catholicism is a joyless religion but the sheer number of Catholic comic novelists (quite apart from anything else) give this charge the lie. Cottrell Boyce’s Catholicism, as he explains in this EWTN interview (Cottrell Boyce appears 34 minutes in), is a liberating force and so it is hardly a surprise that Millions, like all his other books, is full of life, vitality and good humour.

We hear a lot about the decline of the Catholic novel: here is one Catholic writer who is very much alive and kicking.