The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure, by Gerald Durrell, for Timeslip Tuesday

I started reading Gerald Durrell when I was about 11 with The Talking Parcel (a lovely middle grade fantasy I still reread) and My Family and Other Animals (read to pieces), and my mother gradually offered me more as I grew older.  He was a huge influence on me.  But though his writing, at its best, is gloriously entertaining, vivid, and exciting, he did not write because he enjoyed it.  Instead, he said that "To me [writing] is simply a way to make money which enables me to do my animal work, nothing more."

And sadly this seems to be the raison d'etre of today's Timeslip Tuesday book,  The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure (1989).  I was so happy to have found it by happenstance in a used bookstore I was visiting for the first time (Bennett's Books in Connecticut, well worth visiting), and then so disappointed when I read it.

It is the second adventure of the three Dollybutt children (and no, I do not find their last name amusing....) and their whacky great uncle Lancelot, who has a wonderous balloon.  He now has equipped his balloon with a time machine....but evil Sir Jasper and his goon, Throtlethumbs (I again did not chuckle), have stolen a copy of it!  They have gone back to the time of the dinosaurs, to collect babies and bring them back for fame and profit.  And so Lancelot asks the children if they'd care to join him in going back to dinosaur times as well to thwart this plot.

Off they go, and wondrously the dinosaurs can all talk! The kids and the reader meet lots of different species (a bit instructional and not particularly fun reading), dangerous things happen, the bad guys are thwarted with dinosaur help, and they return to their own time not only with the bad guys but with a baby Gnathosaurus and a baby Diplodocus without any troubling ethical questions (although both wanted to go on the journey, I don't think they'd reached the age of consent).

So basically we have 96 pages of an ethical lesson that animal poaching is bad because it is bad, and some now out of date dinosaur instruction.  No character development, no depth to the story, and no sparkly wit.  And I did not care for the villainization of the T Rex (surely a naturalist should appreciate apex predators?), but I did learn Gnathosaurus existed which is some small gain....

Sigh.  It kind of makes the Magic Treehouse books look really great.

1.  Gerald Durrell: The Authorized Biography By Douglas Botting, 1999, p. 261