The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks

I cannot help but like a book whose publishers have the stones to put bad reviews on its back cover. Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, but I'd like to think Scribner's had the same slough of reviews on there from day one. "Trash!" screams one London paper. "Nothing is forcing you to read it... and I wouldn't recommend it," complains a Scottish daily. Of course, it's all balanced out by that "Selected as one of the 100 Best Novels of the Century by The Independent" at the top of the front cover.

So in other words, I was almost predestined to like this book, even if I didn't like it. And there were a few times when i was teetering on the edge, I must say. The book is best summed up by a passage about two-thirds of the way through, dead center of the chapter "What Happened to Eric," that's so wonderfully disgusting it almost causes the mind to shut down (and in fact, it does, to Eric anyway), and so well written that the reader feels the disgust in a palpable way. It's the literary version of Guinea Pig II-- an endurance test rather than something written for the sake of enjoyment. Of course most reviewers aren't going to like it. And any piece of writing capable of making me wonder if I'm going to have nightmares-- especially if it isn't a horror novel-- is tops in my book.

That said, there are any number of flaws in the book, the most notable being that there isn't enough setup for the inevitable ending; we know something's going to go wonky, but there aren't enough clues (in fact, there aren't any) as to what's about to happen. Whether the explanations given to throw the reader off are plausible or not is an invalid argument here, as nothing in this book has any pretention towards plausibility, and that's one of its strong points.

In any case, a small sum up: Frank Cauldhame is a sixteen-year-old sociopath whose life consists, for the most part, of decapitating small dead animals and impaling their heads on poles, feeding wasps into a sadistic contraption in his attic, and griping about his father's insitence on vegetarian cooking. And Frank is a piker compared to his brother Eric, who was involuntarily committed after going insane (which is forgivable under the circumstances-- see second paragraph) and developing obsessions with such family-fun activities as lighting local dogs on fire and forcing schoolchildren to eat maggots. Obviously, a family straight out of the Cosby Show. As the book opens, Eric has escaped from the asylum and is working his way towards the family homestead, an island off the west coast of Scotland about a good two days' walk from Inverness.

While The Wasp Factory is obviously, from page one, a character-driven novel of which Frank is the center, Banks is the guy who brought Eric up and released him from the asylum, so he has to be expecting that readers of suspense fiction are going to get on him for not using Eric's escape and repeated phone calls to Frank as a suspense thing. They're better compared to letters from summer camp-- every once in a while Eric checks in, makes under-the-table comments about dogs, then disappears for a while. Frank tells us about his surroundings, and his character is developed nicely, along with those around him, but there's still something missing from this book. Banks belongs in the same circle of "envelope-pushing novelists who went soft" as, say, Patrick McGrath and Ian McEwan, but whereas those two put out first novels that most certainly belong on any paper's Top 100 Novels of the Century ranking, Banks' is lacking in a few key places. The man does, however, have a great gift for description, and his characters are well-fleshed, often to the point of the plot suffering. And while it'd be nice had he kept the balance, characters are more important than plot, in my way of seeing things, so Banks is at least falling off the correct side of the coin.

I'll look for more work by him; he's certainly worth a second try. ***1/2