2084: The Obesity Farms, by Edd Tury (BookLogix, 2024), 264 pages, pbk, $16.99.
Review by Mack Hassler, U.P. Book Review
“…so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today,
the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of
individuality, of love….
Erich Fromm, “Afterword to 1984” (1949)
I think good writers feel safe when they acknowledge their debts because they know how much good writing is based on community, even family. Edd Tury thanks his life partner, Ellen Lord the poet, as well as a professional copy editor for this first long book (he had published poems and short pieces). But his bold title broadcasts his link to Orwell and to Orwell’s great Irish satirist Swift two hundred years before. But, in fact, Tury jumps out of the gate very strong to conflate Orwell’s later work Animal Farm (1945) with the “Newspeak” of 1984 that had been written much earlier. He opens his narrative with the very funny trope that as automatons we have all become “pigs” for the government Obesity Farms where human fat is harvested to produce diesel fuel to run the fancy technology that is the target of his satire. Whoever created the cover for this fine new satire by Tury focuses well on the “colon” of the two-holed snout of some poor pig at the bottom of the illustration. Our piggyness gets stated early, “First came the fat tax, then the Obesity Police, followed by the American Farm Bill which funded the establishment of large, government operated farms that included central cities to house anyone who chose to pay their fat tax by donating their excess fat to be used in the production of biodiesel fuel.” Pp 4-5. One very funny implication early, also, is the fact the fancy new airline industry decides not to increase air fares to handle increased weight of passengers because people are too poor to pay more due to the fat tax. And therefore too heavy to fly. Very funny.
Most of the hard-hitting satire in this tradition is not only a real “kick” to read but also work that clearly defines the target of the attack. For example, an early satire by Swift (After A Tale of a Tub early in the 18th century and before Gulliver) is the essay-length “A Modest Proposal” where the target is the economic exploitation by the British who are “eating up” the Irish. And so Swift makes his point by having his speaker suggest that since the Brits are so aggressive, they might as well eat newborn babies as well. Very funny and very pointed in its attack as well. Tury picks up the eating from Swift and turns it nicely into the grossness of obesity And then the next step in the logic. We might as well tax it and farm it for fuel.
Swift’s major satire is, of course, Gulliver’s Travels that comes late in his career and where the attack in the fourth book becomes mankind’s own beastliness where Gulliver thinks he is a horse and becomes a total recluse who will only talk to his horses.
Orwell is very like Swift, and his major target is language itself, or “Newspeak” and the “doublethink” that Fromm ends up talking about in his “Afterword” to the book put above as my epigraph. I think Tury is firmly in this tradition of satire. We learn that even the rats, who eat some of the chemically-improved and fat-inducing food that they find as crumbs have become as big as housecats and are tame. Like the humans, they fatten up and this means they lose their innate creatureness. They are not rats anymore. This is nearly a version of poor Gulliver at the end. Gulliver wants at the end only to talk with his horses. They are a race of the animal that he finds called “houyhnhnms” and when they talk they only “whinny”. The progress of Tury’s narrative shows us a move in the same direction of “human-managed” change that is so fundamental that the very nature of humanness changes. The poor rats do not remain rats anymore. And the human changes become just as profound. Such heavy satire (pardon the pun) makes for very effective reading. And it has, also, a clear message I think Tury has learned well from the tradition. None of us as we get older wants to talk only in a “whinny” nor do we want only “to eat.”
Follow Us
