It is his first novel and he was a young, rebellious man when he wrote it. To set those points in context, it is important to remember that Banks wrote the Wasp Factory during the Thatcher years. I wonder if it is quite the ticket to admit to liking this sort of satire in public, but I do like it, for it does have some points to make. There are rude words, gory scenes, rude bits and some quite revolting cruelties to animals. Frank's amoral adventures are really quite sickening and you will need an appetite for the sort of dark comedy that verges on the pornographic. Just a short little book - under two hundred pages - you could read it in an afternoon. Admirably sparse and spare, it is full of short, sharp, acidic and very funny throwaway lines.
Re-reading it after many years this week, it still made me laugh aloud. The Wasp Factory is a sort of whodunnit, howdunnit, whydunnit, all wrapped up in a thick coating of outrageous black humour. Given Frank's own weird, fetishistic existence, this is an extremely worrying prospect. He has escaped from a secure mental hospital and is on his way home. Eric is a charming chap who has taken to setting fire to dogs. Tension rises as Frank waits for Eric, his older brother.
As his father hides away in his study, up to no good, Frank embarks upon military campaigns against rabbits and sacrifices wasps in his own warped version of the Delphi Oracle, The Wasp Factory. Frank's distasteful personal habits and strange, obsessive daily routines are gruesome yet hilarious in the darkest kind of way. Frank is not your run-of-the mill adolescent he announces from the outset that he is a three times familial murderer with the throwaway line, "it was just a stage I was going through". If you did, it'll speak volumes to you, as it did - and does - to me.įrank, a physically deformed young man in his mid-teens, lives with his father - an eccentric man to say the least - on a remote Scottish island. However, it does lose a little in time and place and perhaps you'd need to have lived through 'Thatcher's Britain' to fully appreciate it. It's raw, but it's very, very naughty and very, very funny. Summary: A very funny debut from Banks, who has now become one of the UK's most respected and established writers.
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