The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.
I would happily take any of Iain Banks’s books to twitter island but I’ve chosen his astonishing 1984 debut novel, The Wasp Factory. I think it’s rather incredible (not to mention rather unsettling) that people wander around with this kind of thing in their imagination!
“Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did my young cousin Esmeralda, 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.”
So says Frank Cauldhame, who by the age of sixteen is already a serial killer. Frank lives on a remote Scottish island owned by his reclusive father. Officially he doesn’t even exist; his birth was never registered and he has never attended school.
The Wasp Factory is a disturbing yet compelling tale of one boy’s dysfunctional and isolated life containing many a dark secret, some obsession and ritual and a fair amount of shocking violence. Personally I think that Banks’s brilliant dialogue and dark humour somehow make Frank’s casual descriptions of murder seem all the more horrific. Admittedly, this book is not for the faint hearted; descriptions of animal cruelty and the killing of children by another child are bleak and unsettling to say the least.
Despite this, Banks encourages the reader to feel a certain amount of sympathy for a sociopathic antihero. You can’t like him exactly, but you do develop an understanding that his frame of reference is so skewed that his actions make a warped kind of sense.
It’s difficult to describe the plot without giving too much away but as the story progresses, you learn more about Frank’s unconventional life and discover that much of what he has come to know and understand about himself and the world around him is false. Indeed, Frank’s fundamental sense of self and identity are ultimately undermined, prompting a lot of questions.
A fantastic yet unsettling book.