Dark, Grotesque, and Unflinching: Iain Banks’s ‘The Wasp Factory’

‘Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul […] and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.’

We go through many stages growing up. As a teenager, you might go through a rebellious phase, an angsty stage, a phase of feeling very self-conscious, or periods of feeling exceedingly confident and thinking you know it all. You might go through phases of liking High School Musical, or rock music or being obsessed with The Hunger Games. The majority of people have not, and will not go through a killing phase. Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory is narrated by Frank Cauldhame, a sixteen-year-old who lives on a remote Scottish island with his father. His erratic elder brother Eric is in a psychiatric hospital. Few people know of Frank’s existence, as he doesn’t have a birth certificate, and has never attended formal schooling. As a result, Frank spends the majority of his time observing various rituals of his own creation and maintaining his arsenal of weapons. Several years ago, Frank intentionally murdered two of his cousins and his younger brother.

The narrative of The Wasp Factory is not massively plot-driven. Eric’s escape from the psychiatric hospital and his journey back home frames the narrative. However, the majority of the book focuses on Frank’s everyday life, with flashbacks to the three murders Frank committed several years earlier. In some ways, this is an easy read. It is a relatively short book, and the language used is accessible and uncomplicated. However, in many ways, this is not an easy read at all due to the graphic descriptions of violence, animal abuse, and murder. Equally disturbing is Frank’s unflinching, matter-of-fact tone. Frank relates to the reader how he killed three of his relatives in the same manner used for talking about the weather or what you bought from the supermarket.

The majority of reviews I have read on The Wasp Factory tend to focus on Frank’s psychopathic or compulsive behaviour and pinpoint this as the reason why the book is so unsettling. However, I would argue that what makes The Wasp Factory such a depraved and disturbing book is that, as readers, we are all able to see parts of ourselves in Frank. Like the rest of us, Frank is strong-willed, adventurous, unique, sometimes prejudiced and delusional, and wrapped up in his own world. In the preface, Banks states that ‘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.’ Banks asserts that when writing this book, he mined his own past for ‘exaggerateable experiences.’ As such, the activities Frank engages in are believable and gently push the boundaries of how an ordinary rough-and-ready youngster would occupy themselves if they grew up in the middle of nowhere. Banks states, ‘I’d built dams; Frank would too, though with a slightly psychotic über-motif […] I’d constructed big home-made kites; so would Frank, and use one as a murder weapon […] I’d indulged in the then not-uncommon and perfectly innocent teenage boy pursuits of making bombs, flame-throwers, guns, giant catapults, and more bombs; Frank would too, though alone and with a more determinedly harm-minded intensity.’ As a result, the narrative feels grounded, as opposed to fantastical or overblown.

Of course, I have to touch on the book’s ending. The ending definitely has the ‘shock-factor,’ and I by no means expected such a plot twist. It is definitely a talking point. However, to me, concluding the book in this way didn’t feel entirely necessary. Moreover, the fact that Frank barely reacts to finding out something that would bring your whole world crashing down didn’t sit right with me. I was expecting him to react with rage, confusion, disbelief, fear, disgust, hatred, and astonishment (or at least a couple of these emotions). However, Frank appears totally unperturbed and indifferent. Perhaps someone like Frank would react in this way, as his emotional capacity is different from the ‘ordinary’ person. Nonetheless, to me, the ending felt a bit abrupt and unconvincing.

I must confess that this book had been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while, unread, because I was a bit apprehensive about reading it. Some of my classmates read The Wasp Factory back in sixth form for their A-Level English coursework, and the reaction was fairly mixed. Some people enjoyed the book much more than they had expected, and others felt deeply disturbed by it and said it really wasn’t for them. Overall, I enjoyed this book (if enjoyed is the right word!) as it was dark, intriguing, and direct. Personally, I liked the writing style, and Banks’s use of dark humour, although this book certainly wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste. I would rate The Wasp Factory 3.5 out of 5.