The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks

Sep 2008 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

'One of the most brilliant first novels I have come across' Telegraph

'One of the top 100 novels of the century' Independent

'Brilliant...irresistible...compelling' New York Times

'Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down' Financial Times

'Read it if you dare' Daily Express

The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath - one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels.

'Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, 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.'

Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.

Ratings and reviews

Strange, violent, disturbing. Don't know what to make of it. Certainly original but at its heart a bleak tale of terrible parenting. Not enough humour to be a black comedy as others have suggested, and not enough heart or hope for the surprise ending to resolve the madness. What is the point of this story?

In parts funny, disturbing and (most worryingly) relatable, this is a tale of violence, identity and sympathetic magic. The problem is I am not entirely sure what it is trying to “say”. It is well written, imaginative, well structured and ensures you keep turning the page through the narrator’s statement of accepted “facts” which are not explained until a later chapter. The brutality is sometimes without context, and Eric’s depraved psychoticism stretched credulity as a result of a single horrendous experience and a series of everyday disappointments. But, if taken as a fairy story, with the island representing a fantasy kingdom, it has the same gothic appeal as an Angela Carter story. The exploration of gender identity is not entirely (or at all) convincing, however, again, if taken as metaphor for the realisation as we leave adolescence that we may not be the person we ascribed to, be it works. What astonished me is how “normal” and likeable the author himself is (was, R.I.P.) in interview, giving the impression that the “ultraviolence” was intended to have an air of slapstick about it (Ye ken me droogs? What a mash-up sequel that would be!) The sense of the ordinary within the extraordinary and description of place was extremely effective. I had mapped out Frank’s kingdom in my head, sacrifice poles and all! However, I am still not entirely sure why or how this novel has found its way onto the A-Level course syllabi? It’s a rural, Scottish, teenage American Psycho before there was an American Psycho, a fictionalised Confessions of a Sociopath crossed with a Little-Red-Riding Hood style bildungsroman. It is unique and I imagine for the time ground-breaking, and difficult to pin down- hence the plethora of references to other similar-but-not-really-that-similar texts. And it is also extremely entertaining. I disagree with many reviewers that it conveys a sense of the macabre and depicts graphic scenes of animal torture. Yes there is death and yes the torture is disgusting, but it feels so over the top as to be implausibly ridiculous. It feels to me much more of a black comedy- the novel equivalent of The League of Gentlemen. It is simply too absurd, incredible and frankly silly to be otherwise.

One of my favourite books ever. Ive read it 5 times and find it amazing. Its dark, dirty an grimey. Ian banks describes the scottish island they live on superbly you really can picture everything. One of his best.

About the author

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. He gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels. Iain Banks died in June 2013.