Published 1984 / Length 184 pages
Sixteen-year-old Frank Cauldhame inhabits a remote Scottish island with his eminently dysfunctional ‘family’, which consists of his eccentric father and absent brother Eric. He presides over his territories through the observance of a macabre array of self-devised rituals, fixated on violence and death and self-consciously gothic in flavour. As Frank narrates his strange story, we learn some of the roots of this morbidity, and they make for uncomfortable reading. This is not a novel for the faint-hearted, but it is utterly gripping as Frank ushers us into the landscape of his twisted history and the protective, perverse mythology he has built around it. The wasp factory of the title is a bizarre mechanism constructed behind a salvaged clock face, in which live wasps ‘choose’ their bitter ends. Frank uses this apparatus as an oracle and talisman. He has never been in more need of its power as his estranged brother Eric closes in on the island and the Cauldhames still uneasily cohabiting there.
‘A silly, gloatingly sadistic and grisly yarn of a family of Scots lunatics … the lurid literary equivalent of a video nasty.’ – Sunday Express
• There is a sensational twist in Frank’s tale – did you anticipate this revelation? How does it retrospectively inform your reading of the book?
• What does Frank gain from his fetishistic totems and rituals?
• The Wasp Factory has been called a dark comedy – do you agree with this interpretation?
• Were Frank’s actions ‘just a stage [he] was going through’, as he claims?
• The Wasp Factory was the prolific Iain Banks’s first novel and generated critical controversy – it was variously acclaimed and viciously condemned by reviewers.
• The book was written during the years when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, and it has been suggested that it describes the 1980s cult of the individual taken to an illogical and destructive extreme, in a similar vein to Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
• The author also writes science-fiction novels under the name Iain M. Banks.
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. SALINGER (see here) – Holden Caulfield is the classic isolated adolescent.
• Vernon God Little by D. B. C. PIERRE (see here) – Booker Prize-winning meditation on disenfranchized youth, also blackly comic.
• Morvern Callar by ALAN WARNER – stunning portrait of a female Scottish outsider.
• Robinson Crusoe by DANIEL DEFOE – it has been suggested that The Wasp Factory is a retelling of Defoe’s classic.