Customer Reviews

Fat

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Fat is follows the events of three different people. Grenville is a TV chef with anger management problems who has stacked on the kilograms over the years and is now quite obese, no longer able to find anything other than sport tracksuits on the racks that fit him anymore. One day he decides to do something about this so signs up to his local gym. His treatment and the way he deals with this along with the events following makes for some fun reading. Jeremy Slank fancies himself as a bit of a ladies man, he's very good as his job as a conceptuologist and knows it. The British prime minister has asked him to help market the new Well Farms which are camps that will help the obese get back to normal and stop being a burden on taxpayers. Hayleigh has an eating disorder and is the serious third of this storyline. All storylines ultimately cross at one time or another in what is a very interesting and at times hilarious book. I'll definitely check out other books by this author.

Other similar authors include Max Barry, John O'Farrell and Bill Fitzhugh, check them out as well.

Maybe Grant writes for a niche audience, but I find his work to be both funny and insightful. His characters are absurd, but the same way that the fellow down the hall at work or the neighbour up the block may well be.. or maybe even we would appear to others if they were viewing us without any of the social barriers we use to protect our privacy. Grant creates an social and political environment where the obese become social pariah, and his novel's three main characters provide some opposing views on the whole concept of body image and (mental) health. The take off on the Tony Blair-ish British PM is bang-on, while the character of the budding bulimic teen was handled with considerable empathy as well as a healthy dose of humour.
I have followed Grant's work, post-"Red Dwarf", and this is his best yet. just be cautious of reading it in a public place, because you will "LOL".

Well I couldn't resist the pun!

Fat isn't really SF. It's one of those books that's warning of the ills of following a particular trend in social management to try to warn us about our current situation. It's set in the very near future, a future where being fat isn't illegal, yet, but it's legal to charge for a flight by weight, to charge extra in trains and busses, to discriminate basically because people are fat. All that overweight people hear is that they have to just buck up and lose weight.

Like that's easy.

This is the story of three characters, Grenville Roberts, a chef who has slipped into obese while he wasn't watching, a man having the worst day of his life. Jeremy Slank, a PR man, or as he prefers a Conceptuologist, who has got the job of promoting the Government's new Fat Farms and Hayleigh, a teenager obsessed with food and weight and determined to impress her pop star idol, some day.

Along with these three there's Jemma Bartlet, a research assistant who is the scientific mouthpiece for the author and lust object for Jeremy.

It's a story of how weight could become a bigger issue and how the simplistic views of weight gain and loss are actually damaging. I found Grenville's story to be the most heartbreaking, Grant goes through his morning ritual and the effort he has to put into getting from bed to car. The subsequent visit to the Gym was the trigger for his later irate reaction and you could see how just one more moment of humiliation would put someone over the edge.

It's interesting, funny in places, thought provoking in others but overall it just didn't flow well and sometimes it felt like the author was lecturing to you, the ending also felt rushed and I don't really see much space for a sequel.

Rob Grant has written a polemic on the way goverments use key issues first to scare us, then to make themselves look capable, and finally to get themselves re-elected.

Instead of lecturing us, Grant tells a funny story through the eyes of four characters.
At one end of the Fat scale is Grenville, the lardy chef, who is now too large to shop off the peg. He is fired for being too fat in a near future world where the Fat pay more because they cost money in airline fuel and train space.
At the other end is Hayleigh, the boy band obsessed anorexic, for whom all life revolves around the need to avoid food at all costs.
In the middle are Jeremy, the PR guy who has to sell the idea of Fat concentration camps to the nation, and his love interest, who is our speaking book on epidemiology and everything we need to know about fat and nutrition and other Government cons.

This book taught me a lot about the problems of being fat, anger management, anorexia nervosa, boiling eggs, PR and body odour in boy bands. But the best thing was that the book is so funny, it made me laugh out loud on many occasions. A great read, impossible to put down. Very well written.

Being one half of the team that wrote Red Dwarf, you'd expect nothing less than to be chortling right to the end of this book. Didn't really quite turn out that way. True, Grant's book is probably the 'lightest' read of all the books coming out lately which seem to dwell on characters who are physically larger than life. But... To be honest, the only bit that made me laugh was the caption giving his bio under his image on the back cover...

"Fat" follows 3 people all waging some war with weight. I will admit this book (unintentionally?) gave a very interesting and thought provoking insight into the morbidly obese. I also learnt some very interesting facts about boiling an egg... But the two 'extreme' characters were so extreme it got, well, tedious reading them as they went through this 'moment' in their lives as Grant went into painfully nitty gritty detail. For a funny book, it was to nitty gritty. Interesting, but ultimately, not very funny.

As to the 3rd character, well this character was clearly a vehicle for 'setting the record straight.' And I would have been fine with that as well (having read it all before), if it hasn't been written so, well, chest-thumping and pulpit pounding. It does strike me that a lot of western governments are focusing on using things which ultimately aren't the doom and end of the planet as a way to provoke fear in us. And weight is one of those issues... I mean, when it comes to weight, what I don't understand is why no one is questioning all the chemicals and hormones the big companies are putting into our food as a source of why we can't shift weight like we used to a generation ago??? Is there a bigger cover up - by trying to shift the blame onto us not 'exercising enough' and not'eating healthy' - are the big companies trying to dodge that bullet of 'gosh guys, maybe if you (big company) didn't put growth hormone in all cows and chickens, we might not be porking out so much?? Well, that question wasn't addressed at all!

But I digress, that isn't what Rob Grant was trying to display in this book. In the end, all he seems to have produced a quite readable, admitedly unputdownable book - but I would attribute that more to the old "end the chapter in a cliffhanger' technique than any true desire to keep turning pages. I guess its tough in a way - if you don't have a serious weight issue, in a way you can't really relate to the characters - largely because you get every thought spelt out in painful detail - and so even if there is humour in what Grant is writing about, you don't really care to much about the characters. I might have cared more if Grant had created more outrageous circumstances surrounding the characters - and not dwelled so much on the inner agonising of the characters.