New Title Review

I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train

by Peter Hobbs (Faber, February 2006)

Hobbs’s first book, the novel A Short Day Dying, was well received by critics; his second, this collection of short stories, deserves equal praise for the confidence of its writing and the range of its subject matter.

Hobbs is adept at probing into the emotions that underlie bleak human experience. In 'Paula' , for example, the eponymous narrator rails against the inability of her friends to offer more than sympathetic platitudes to her plight (both her legs have been amputated following a car accident). 'Fit' is about a young epileptic institutionalised by his illness; 'Jack' describes a man who doesn’t recognise the desperate character staring back at him from the mirror, and spends most of his time waiting for things to go wrong.

However, there is much more to this collection than the gloom and doom of pointless existence. Hobbs displays a great talent for humour, which lightens the tone of I Could Ride All Day .... 'Movie in Ten Scenes' is a hilarious tale about a London geezer who wants to make a gangster film; in 'Bum Rules' a researcher counts the stripes on zebras’ backsides, while his colleague Dr De’ath conducts mysterious experiments on chickens in a sealed shed.

Other stories display the author’s penchant for the surreal: 'Molloy Dies' charts the postmortem wanderings of a lonely academic; 'Dog Days on Monkey Beach' is a sort of Lord of the Flies with an ending I didn’t understand; and 'New Orleans Blues' is about a man who repeatedly goes to sleep in his home in England, but wakes up in Louisiana.

But my two favourite stories – which differ absolutely from each other in subject and genre - display an exuberance that justify between them the purchase of the book. 'Winter Luxury Pie' is a remarkable, gentle and humane fourteen-page family saga that could - in the wrong hands - have been stretched into an epic Great American Novel; and 'Deep Blue Sea', a science fiction/fantasy story set in a wholly believable future world, is an imaginative tour de force.

I Could Ride All Day ... highlights the diversity and sheer excitement of Hobbs’s writing. It also proves that well-written short stories are more than a match for their longer and flabbier cousin, the novel.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust Literature & Information Officer