FAT

by Rob Grant

If you like Red Dwarf then you'll like this. Simple. If you don't like Red Dwarf then you must be some kind of smeghead, so smeg off.

And that's about the tone of the book. An interesting illustration of how to put intelligent debate on the social issues of the day in an amusingly crass style - unsuitable for under-15s I'd say. The issue at large, being the horizontally-challenged. Dieting, epistemological studies thereof, sex, discrimination and civic coercion to become THIN.

We follow the eventually-colliding fortunes of three main characters: Grenville, a porky TV chef with anger issues, Jeremy, a smarmy PR leach with ego and relationship issues, and Hayleigh, an anorexic teenage girl with starving-to-death issues. Despite the subject, this is a very much a deep-fried treatment which you'll be making excuses to those people out there in non-bookland to finish all in one go. Just make sure that you're not reading it on the tube while peering over the top to smirk at some overblown lard-arse with an attitude problem.

Our characters are all basically sympathetic, and I think Rob Grant has made a valiant effort to get inside an anorexic girl's mind. From his picture on the fly-leaf, I don't think he's had to make any effort at all to get into Greville's. Ultimately this is both a cry for debate about possible Clockwork Orange-style rehibilitation for the fat, and a tragicomedy about our heroes' efforts to overcome almost-unsurmountably large problems.

It's actually less of a book, and more like sitting around laughing at a good stand-up comic for a lost few hours while he puts the boot in diets, gyms, the government, coke-snorting celebrities (some of this is real cutting-edge stuff), British society at large, and our attitudes to fat.

For its genre, it's tops. And that's its combination strong and weak point really. Some people just don't like crass schoolboy humor. Smegheads.


© Arjuna Krishna-Das 2007. This page last modified 11 March, 2007	Top