Bzz... (The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks)

Member Name: l-m-n-o-p

Product:	The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Date:	20/06/06 (782 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hilarious, brilliantly written, dark and weird

Disadvantages: Twist is a let down, it's not suitable for everyone

“Sick”. “Disturbing”. “Disgusting”. Just glancing through some of the other reviews of Iain Banks’s debut novel, The Wasp Factory, these seem to be the most commonly used words. But I think they’ve missed out the most important one: FUNNY.

The Wasp Factory is described on the front cover as “a gothic horror”, and sure, it does contain a lot of gore, violence and killing. However, when I read this book I found it funny more than anything. It’s black humour, certainly, probably as black as it gets, and definitely quite shocking in parts. But there was nothing “scary” or particularly disturbing about it, at least not to me anyway! Maybe I’m just a freak…

The story is written from the perspective of Frank Cauldhame, a 16 year old boy who lives on a remote Scottish island with his dad. Frank doesn’t officially exist. His older brother, Eric, has just escaped from a mental hospital and is on the rampage. And his dad likes to ask him the capacity of their dessert spoons. Oh, and Frank has already killed three children. Quite an eccentric family, don’t you think?

However, Frank is over all that; “it was just a phase I was going through” declares the back cover. Nowadays, he prefers to get drunk with his dwarf friend, build then explode dams, burn rabbits, put the heads of dead birds on sticks, and torture wasps with a homemade device called The Factory. What a charming young man.

If you think this plot sounds absolutely vile and revolting, you’re dead right, but that should not stop you reading this fantastic book. It’s marvellously written for a start. Banks has an amazing gift for dialogue; the hilarious phone conversations between Frank and Eric being the primary exponent of this skill. His descriptions veer from graphic and depraved to beautiful, as we enter into Frank’s lonely world and his life on this barren but exciting island. His imagery is great; you can really picture the scenery in your mind, and yes, although he does dwell on the sadistic and sickening violence, he puts it across with great panache!

What really puts this book up there with the best of the Twentieth Century is Bank’s astonishing and downright bizarre imagination. I won’t spoil it for you, but the ways in which Frank dispatches his younger brothers and cousins, especially the third one, are simply genius. The brilliance of these scenes lies in the twisted humour that’s used. As one review inside the front cover states, “you can’t laugh and throw up at the same time”, and for me that just about sums it up. I was laughing my head off at horrible violence, and that must surely mark the talent of the writer if he can make me do that! The eccentricities of Frank’s father are also completely hilarious; I found him one of the funniest, and strangest, characters I have ever come across.

Other notable bizarre dealings of this scary imagination include the story of “what happened to Eric”, which culminates in one of the most disgusting images you can imagine. Also, the Wasp Factory itself is a marvellous creation. As with the rest of the novel, it’s quite sadistic and sick, but also strangely beautiful, and it has a metaphorical meaning for the whole book. Plus I don’t like wasps.

Great shakes have been made about the “amazing twist” at the end, not least my mum who kept asking me “Have you got to the twist yet?”, which thus diminished the whole excitement of finding the twist. I have to say, although it’s every bit as imaginative as the rest of the book, it wasn’t particularly special. It made me think a bit, and say “ohh, that’s interesting”, but it wasn’t the kind of twist that makes you want to go back and read it all again to spot the clues. A bit of a letdown.

I thought the structure and pacing of The Wasp Factory were good. Right from the start, the narrative drops in tantalising clues and phrases, for example Frank keeps referring to “The Factory”, but only near the end does he finally tell us what that entails. The flashbacks of how he killed his relations, and how he and Eric wound up the way they are, are dispersed regularly throughout the 200 or so pages, so that you keep reading on to find out, but Banks only lets you in on it a bit at a time. Towards the end I was completely hooked as Eric got closer and closer, and the ending was well-judged, although perhaps a bit brief.

To sum up, The Wasp Factory is a great book. It’s packed full of inventiveness, oddities, great dialogue and a lot of seriously dark humour. Probably too dark for some, which would explain all the “this freaked me out” comments. Yes, it does contain a lot of sadistic cruelty to animals, and yes, it does include a lot of graphic torture and violence, which is enhanced by the fact the protagonist is so young, but you have to remember, it’s only a fiction novel. You don’t have to read it, but I would thoroughly recommend that you do.

Oh and by the way, The Wasp Factory was published in 1984. I hadn’t realised it was so old (22 years!), so maybe in its day it was completely radical and extremely violent, like the Clockwork Orange of its day. That would explain a lot of the disgust. These days, it probably doesn’t seem so bad, although I’ll leave that up to you to decide!

Don’t have nightmares!
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You can buy The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks on www.amazon.co.uk for £6.39. It is also available in Audiobook format, read by the brilliant Peter Capaldi, for £7.25 (also www.amazon.co.uk).

Other works of fiction by Iain Banks include:

Walking On Glass
The Bridge
Espedair Street
Canal Dreams (I've read this too, it's not as good as Wasp Factory)
The Crow Road
Complicity
Whit

And science fiction novels by Iain M. Banks include:

Consider Phlebas
The Player Of Games
Use Of Weapons
The State Of The Art
Against A Dark Background
Feersum Endjinn
Excession

Summary: Torturous sadism and animal cruelty... all in a day's work