- Grant, Rob.
Fat.
London: Gollancz, 2006.
ISBN 978-0-575-07820-8.
-
Every now and then, you have a really bad day. If
you're lucky, you actually experience such days less
frequently than you have nightmares about them (mine
almost always involve
trade shows, which demonstrates
how traumatic that particular form of torture can be).
The only remedy is to pick up the work of a master who
shows you that whatever's happened to you is nothing
compared to how bad a day really can be—this is such
a yarn. This farce is in the fine tradition of
Evelyn Waugh
and
Tom Sharpe,
and is set in a future in which the British nanny state
finally decides to do something about the “epidemic of
obesity” which is bankrupting the National Health
Service by establishing Well Farms, modelled upon that earlier
British innovation, the
concentration
camp.
The story involves several characters, all of whom experience
their own really bad days and come to interact in unexpected
ways (you really begin to wonder how the author is going to
pull it all together as the pages dwindle, but he does, and
satisfyingly). And yet, as is usually the case in the genre,
everything ends well for everybody.
This is a thoroughly entertaining romp, but there's also a
hard edge here. The author skewers a number of food fads
and instances of bad science and propaganda in the field
of diet and nutrition and even provides a list of resources
for those interested in exploring the facts behind the
nonsense spouted by the “studies”, “reports”,
and “experts” quoted in the legacy media.
May 2009 