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The
Wasp
Factory is written in the
first person and the viewpoint
character is a sixteen-year-old boy named Frank Cauldhame. Frank is not
an average teenager and, young though he is, he has already got three
murders under his belt. He has got away with all of them.
You don’t have to get very far into the story before you
realize that you have entered the head of a madman. Frank is as clever
as he is unbalanced though, and he appears to be quite an expert on
some rather nasty subjects. He is, for example, frighteningly adept at
making his own explosives and he has built up quite a stash of pipe
bombs.
Frank lives with his father, Angus, on a Scottish island. Like his son,
Angus is more than a little unconventional, even a little eccentric
maybe, but he is at least harmless and can be quite entertaining. Angus
has an obsession with measurements and is proud of the fact that he
knows the dimension and capacities of nearly everything in his home; a
skill that Frank has been forced to learn too.
Angus does not work and so spends most of his time on the island, where
he has educated Frank himself rather than send him to school. Sending
him to school would have been difficult anyway because Frank does not
officially exist. His birth was never registered.
Frank has actually received a very good education from his father.
Angus is a very intelligent man -- a doctor of chemistry, or perhaps
biochemistry, Frank is not sure which. He is in no doubt about his
father's strange sense of humour though. For many years Frank believed
that Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, but now that he is old enough
to visit the Porteneil Library and check up on a few things Angus knows
better than to try and trick his son.
One of the mysteries in The
Wasp Factory is where Angus'
money comes from. This is
never fully explained, but Frank believes that his father may receive a
royalty payment for a patent of some kind, or else is just living on
whatever old money the Cauldhame family has hidden away. That might be
the truth of it as well because the family has been in the area for
over two hundred years and used to own a lot of land. Even the local
pub is named after them.
Frank’s only real friend is a dwarf named Jamie and at least
once a week Frank walks across the bridge to the mainland and into the
town to have a few drinks with him in the Cauldhame Arms. Frank usually
leans against a pillar while Jamie sits on his shoulders and rests his
pint on top of Frank’s head. It paints an odd picture in the
mind, but it can be rather amusing; especially when Jamie is trying to
chat up women. Frank has no interest in women, a childhood accident saw
to that.
The exact details about Frank’s accident remain a mystery
until well into the book and even then are not fully explained until
the very end. Frank’s ‘accident’ is only
one of many mysteries that can be found within the pages of The Wasp Factory
though. For instance, like Frank, the reader is forced to spend a lot
of time wondering what secrets are locked behind the door of
Angus’ Laboratory. Then there is the mystery of
Frank’s brother Eric, who has just escaped from a mental
institution and is making his way back to the island. What exactly
drove Eric mad? And how many dogs will he burn before he reaches home?
We can guess why Eric hates dogs (because of what happened to Frank),
but why is he obsessed with worms and maggots? And why has he been
known to try and force children to eat them? The answer to this
question is revealed in one of the books more disturbing scenes.
Eric might be the family’s official madman, but at leas he
only presents a
true danger to animals. Frank, on the other hand, who is believed to be
at least reasonably normal, is like a ticking time bomb that could go
off at any moment. Or not. All it needs is the right trigger. The
biggest question in the book though is, of course, what exactly is The
Wasp Factory? The reader receives hints here and there, but again, must
wait until the end of the book.
The
Wasp Factory
is 244 pages long, I’ve read it twice now, and I have never
read a book quite like it. It is as amusing as it is scary and the way
that Iain Banks mixes these two ingredients together plays a big part
is giving the book its unique literary flavour. The central character,
Frank, is very easy to like even though you can never be sure what he
will do next or whether or not he will kill again. Most of the other
characters are also easy to like, with the possible exception of
Angus’ second wife, who the reader only gets to meet in
flashback.
When you do reach the end of the book, after having read so much about
The Wasp Factory, and finally found out what it is; the last couple of
pages, where Frank compares life to The Factory are very poignant and
powerful indeed. The
Wasp Factory is a great story
and although some of the
scenes are quite shocking I feel that many readers would probably enjoy
this book whether or not they normally consider themselves a
‘horror’ reader or not. Give it a try. You might be
pleasantly surprised.
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