The Wasp Factory went Boom! right up my nose. This is not a book for the faint of heart. Like
Lord of the Flies, Clockwork Orange, or Ian McEwan's early work, this is a visceral and unsettling brew. But it made me think a lot, and it was still spinning webs in my head long after I put the book down.
What is good about The Wasp Factory? It's full of craft, cleverness and originality. If you have a dark, twisted sense of humor, it can be hilarious in places. It is a kind of gothic horror novel, but it's told with an absorbing realism, and a keen awareness of all the humanity in its monsters.
The plotting is magnificent. Please don't read the wikipedia entry on The Wasp Factory ! It spoils far too much. Banks enjoys his secrets. In this book, they are dangerous and powerful: Characters hold them over each other, as if they were wizards guarding their true names. So it's hard for me to explain the book without spoiling parts. Banks so enjoyed the intricate puzzle he designed here, that he crams three mysteries worth of questions into one short book. He gradually unspools his various threads and, even at the end, you will miss some of the patterns in his tapestry. I only found out what the father was really doing on his trips into town, because I happened upon an interview in which Banks revealed it. Which tied together a few inessential loose ends from the book.
The Wasp Factory reminds me of The Great Gatsby or The Old Man and the Sea, in that its 180 pages feel as if they point to 600 pages more, of hidden details and plotting.
This is not to say you should read this book. I have a high tolerance for the strange and dark, but there were aspects of this book that got right under my skin. In the end, for me, it was so fresh, intriguing and powerful, that it was well worth reading.
Iain Banks died two months ago, may he Rest In Peace. Here are links to two diaries on the SF Novels he wrote as Iain M. Banks.
He had a puckish sense of humor, as he showed on the cover of The Wasp Factory, which has blurbs from critics who hated the book interspersed with blurbs of praise:
"One of the top 100 novels of the century." - The Independent
"Brilliant . . . irresistible . . . compelling." - The New York Times
"There's nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it." - The Scotsman
"A literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency." - Times Literary Supplement
The Wasp Factory is a brilliant and horrible book - depending on your own tastes and angle of approach.
The most original part of Banks's creation is the voice of his narrator, Frank Cauldhame. Frank is a 16 year old boy, growing up on the east coast of Scotland, north of Edinburgh. He has an older brother Eric, who was put away in an institution. Eric escapes at the start of the book, and heads home, growing more unpredictable and threatening as he approaches.
Frank and his father Angus live in a large house on an island. There is a bridge leading into Porteneil, and Frank sometimes goes into town on errands, or to meet his only friend, Jamie. Each of the three Cauldhames is slightly deranged, in different ways.
Frank is a reliable narrator, but he's only partly rational. He has a kind of shamanistic worldview, involving sympathetic magic, psychic links, prophecy and animal sacrifice. The wasps get the worst of it. Frank has a devious but logical mind, and often has a lot of insight into people around him.
But there aren't many people around Frank. His father is an eccentric ex-professor. For reasons of his own, he has raised Frank entirely off the grid: There is no official record of Frank's existence. Frank mostly inhabits a world of his own, a sort of Robinson Crusoe exploring his island. His strange worldview is just what happens, when you're raised without any school or socialization, at the hands of a twisted eccentric who really enjoys lying:
My father once had me believing that the earth was a Möbius strip, not a sphere. He still maintains that he believes this, and makes a great show of sending off a manuscript to publishers down in London, trying to get them to publish a book expounding this view, but I know he's just mischief-making again, and gets most of his pleasure from his acts of stunned disbelief and then righteous indignation when the manuscript is eventually returned. This occurs about every three months, and I doubt life would be half as much fun for him without this sort of ritual . . .
I probably know more about the conventional school subjects than most people of my age. I could complain about the truth of some of the bits of information my father passed on to me, mind you. Ever since I was able to go into Porteneil alone and check things up in the library my father has had to be pretty straight with me, but when I was younger he used to fool me time after time, answering my honest but naïve questions with utter rubbish. For years I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness.
Should Darkness be Funny, Thrilling, Ugly or Human?
There are many shades of darkness: Dirty, corrupt, criminal, diseased, deranged, violent, manipulative, cruel, perverse, bigoted, drugged, depressed, suffering, enraged. So many shades of not good. Many of these shades, in small doses, are just part of human nature. But, taken to extremes, they spread damage.
Darkness is in the world, and darkness is in us. Of course we look at it, and address it in books. But how should we handle it? That depends on many things - especially how deep into the darkness you want to go, and how close up you want to look at it.
In a cartoon, it's appropriate for Tom to get squashed flat as a pancake, only to spring right back up and start chasing Jerry again. Even kids get this, and know that this particular extreme violence doesn't really count. In a fairy-tale or a Disney movie, the darkness can get scary but (at least in our modern versions) usually gets wrapped up nice and neatly before the end. That's what a fairy-tale ending means. Except for the traumatic death of Bambi's mother.
In adult fiction, the nastiness, violence, suffering and loss are often more deep and permanent. That depends a lot on the writer: On how seriously and precisely they understand the darkness, and on whether they have the skill and take the care to make us feel its full gravity.
I have a lot of respect for Clint Eastwood's Westerns, for how he handles brutality, misogyny and racism. He makes them count, he makes the viewer uncomfortable watching them. Unforgiven is all about this darkness, the human costs of heroic dreams, but his '70s Westerns already cut deeper than viewers were used to. I find the Dirty Harry movies more troubling: They show the dangers and costs of the darkness, but they seem to also glamorize power and violence.
American Psycho is probably Bret Easton Ellis's most acclaimed and powerful book. He deliberately shocks the reader, with both violence and wickedness. But I didn't find it horrifying. There was too much glee. Ellis was laughing, sometimes with his readers, sometimes up his sleeve, at the anti-hero and his Wall Street world. I laughed out loud at the business card one-upmanship, but I never felt that these people were fully human.
Frank Cauldhame in The Wasp Factory was a far more absorbing character. I'm sure many readers just didn't get him, didn't like him at all. But I trusted Banks's weird magic. As the whole tangled tale developed, I saw with sharpening clarity just how scary a sociopath Frank could be; but I also felt how much he cared for his brother and father, and how connected he was to the island and the magic in his head. Frank became more of a monster and more affectingly human. This was the most upsetting journey in the book for me. And the freshest. Frank was funny, thrilling, ugly and human, all jumbled together.
I've given you some sense of the quiddity of this strange book, but you'll have to read the book if you want to experience the full spell of it. If you haven't read any Banks, I wouldn't start with this one. I loved The Bridge, and enjoyed The Crow Road; his SF books are more playful - check the two links after the first orange divider for suggestions.
I can give you more of a taste of the flavor of The Wasp Factory, from a piece Banks wrote a few years ago in The Guardian: Out of this world Iain Banks on how practising with SF led to The Wasp Factory.
Here are the last few paragraphs, about what he aimed for, and why he wrote
a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenager with severe violence issues allowed me to treat my story as something resembling SF. The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. I gave in to the write-what-you-know school but with a dose of skiffy hyperbole, mining my own past for exaggerateable experiences. I'd built dams; Frank would too, though with a slightly psychotic uber-motif involving women, water, the sea and revenge. I'd constructed big home-made kites; so would Frank, and use one as a murder weapon. Along with a pal, I'd indulged in the then not-uncommon and perfectly innocent teenage boy pursuit of making bombs, flame-throwers, guns, giant catapults and more bombs; Frank would too, though alone and with a more determinedly harm-minded intensity.
Beyond that, it was supposed to be a pro-feminist, antimilitarist work, satirising religion and commenting on the way we're shaped by our surroundings and upbringing and the usually skewed information we're presented with by those in power. Frank is supposed to stand for all of us, in some ways; deceived, misled, harking back to something that never existed, vengeful for no good reason and trying too hard to live up to some oversold ideal that is of no real relevance, anyway. There are places, too, where I was trying to use Frank to express something about the stated and real reasons for brutality (hence Frank's musings on the attack on the rabbit warren).
I was also trying to make the point that childhood innocence isn't - and wasn't - as most people seem to imagine it; children probably harbour quite as many violent thoughts as adults, they just don't usually possess a sophisticated moral framework within which to place them.
Not, come to think of it, that all adults do, either.