Book Reviews: Taft 2012 + The Fat Years
Political Thriller/Historical Fiction Double Feature
I’ve never attempted to do a “double feature” book review before, but I found it only appropriate for The Fat Years and Taft 2012 given their painful correlation with modern political and economic realities. Perhaps one of the most beautiful advantages of fiction is its ability to articulate emotional or dark concepts in the abstract allowing use to ruminate on them mentally while enjoying a significantly lessened emotional investment. For this reason I highly recommend that you read both The Fat Years and Taft 2012. While Taft 2012 deals largely with the current political situation within the United States (especially in the middle of primary season), The Fat Years provides a more global understanding of a perhaps not so farfetched scenario of how international political turmoil might play out. Both books have an amazing potential to entertain while at the same time planting the ideas for the discourses and dialogues that need to happen.
The Fat Years: A Novel
Set in a future that we have so often been urged to fear, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years captures China’s meteoric ascendency to world hegemony following a period of economic turbulence which made the 2008 real estate bubble look like a minor accounting error.
China’s rise appears to have coincided with a period of unprecedented happiness throughout its boundaries. Social unrest is virtually non-existent and citizens have come to respect the governments domineering role in their lives. The atrocities of the past seemed to be erased from the collective memory of the people. Times couldn’t be better.
Koonchung’s story follows the story of Lao Chen and a small circle of friends as they struggle to revive China’s lost month (a period that they believe to be marked both by unparalleled social unrest and tyrannical governmental enactment of martial law). Outside of Chen and his few politically concerned friends, no one seems able to recall any memory of the “lost month” or the events that imperiled the United States’ role as a super power, thrusting China to the top. As they struggle to reach out to others who feel deceived by the government, they also find a preponderance of evidence that the Chinese government has found a means to suppress its citizen by changing the past: newspaper articles are modified to skew public perceptions and the internet is constantly under revision to suite the interest of the state.
Oddly The Fat Years isn’t a fast paced thriller with car chases and attempts to squash the opposition voices of Chen and friends. Instead Koonchung moves methodically through the plot weaving in segments of Chinese culture into a storyline that is far too close to a political possibility for comfort. Chan does an absolutely incredible job of creating a politically viable explanation as to how China was able to capitalize on a second world-wide market crisis in order to wrest power from the West.
The description for The Fat Years draws parallels to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and while that description certainly rings true, the storyline is much darker and nefarious than that envisioned by Huxley. In Koonchung’s story, the government doesn’t control its people for their own safety but for the furtherance of the government, which has become an ends in and of itself. Koonchung steps things up a notch with an unfolding of events that doesn’t seem out of place within modern international politics. The Fat Years shows readers in the West a stark glimpse of what the beginning of the end may look.
Taft 2012
Through some unexplained magic of science and time the long missing President William Howard Taft (this is historical fiction) has returned to Washington, DC. After undergoing a Fifth Element-esque reintroduction to modern society, President Taft is introduced into the very real political turmoil of the 21st century and the dramatic factions fueled by the two-party electoral system. He is also simultaneously introduced to the modern scenario of corporate personhood and the military-industrial complex.
Taft’s experiences reflect a type of alienation that could occur only in a scenario where someone was shielded from the tragedies of modern time. His unique place in the historical context allows him to envision a more civilized political future reflective of the experience of his cohorts. Taft quickly takes the nation by storm spawning the emergence of the “Tafties” or Taft Party – a grassroots effort to take control of America and return it to the hands of its people.
Taft is as reluctant of an emerging political figure as he was a president and shies away from his return to the lime light. His granddaughter’s elevated profile (who coincidentally happens to be a United States Congresswoman) since his return eventually launches him full forces into the mainstream of American politics as the newly empowered Taft Party’s presidential candidate. Taft is convinced that America needs to gain perspective and that while he may not be the individual to provide it, he may serve as an inspiration for it.
Told from a biographical vantage, the Taft 2012 assembles a number of media reports, Twitter feeds, Secret Service logs, and other memoirs to fill in the blanks. Author Jason Heller offers a comical (and critical) perspective of the divisiveness within the modern political spectrum. Admittedly, a former president from 100 years in the past seems a ridiculous notion, but given the current spectacle… it makes as much sense as anything else on the table.
Josh O’Conner is a Planner in Asheville, North Carolina. He received review copies of these books from Amazon.com. You can find him on the web at triggerhippie.com, localplan.org, linkedin.com/in/joshoconner or twitter.com/joshoconner. Contact Josh via e-mail (josh -at-localplan.org).
