Frank Cauldhame, the narrator of Iain Banks’s 1984 debut novel The Wasp Factory, is a teenage psychopath. Frank lives with his eccentric father on an island in rural Scotland. He is an unregistered person with “no birth certificate, no National Insurance number,” nothing to officially prove his existence. He enjoys this unofficial existence, patrolling his island, which he protects through various rituals.
One of these rituals is to construct and maintain “Sacrifice Poles,” and when we first meet Frank, he is “making the rounds” of these talismans: “One of the Poles held a rat head with two dragonflies, the other a seagull and two mice.” Frank has to keep plenty of dead animals on hand for his ritual defenses, and he kills them by slingshot, air-gun, explosives, and even an improvised flamethrower. (Readers sensitive to depictions of animal cruelty, or just cruelty in general, may wish to avoid The Wasp Factory.)
Another of Frank’s rituals consists of sacrificing a live wasp to the titular Wasp Factory (“beautiful and deadly and perfect,” in our narrator’s words). Frank has devised the Wasp Factory as a bizarre death trap built from “the face of the old clock which used to hang over the door of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Porteneil.” Once introduced to the Factory, the poor wasp can fall prey to one of a dozen different deaths, including the Boiling Pool, the Spider’s Parlour, the Acid Pit, or even “the rather jocularly named Gents (where the instrument of ending is [Frank’s] own urine, usually quite fresh).”
Frank’s urine becomes an important motif in The Wasp Factory. We learn fairly early that he is a “unique eunuch,” supposed victim of a dog bite accident that has left him forever unmanned (and deeply misogynistic). Our lad must piss sitting down, a shame he accepts with a hateful forbearance. Urine flows throughout the novel, an abject magical potion.
Indeed, Frank’s rituals frequently call for the most abject residues and excretions for the magic to work. Consider the Naming Ceremony he performs for a new weapon he’s purchased:
I smeared the metal, rubber and plastic of the new device with earwax, snot, blood, urine, belly-button fluff and toenail cheese, christened it by firing the empty sling at a wingless wasp crawling on the face of the Factory, and also fired it at my bared foot, raising a bruise.
Parts of me thought all this was nonsense, but they were in a tiny minority. The rest of me knew this sort of thing worked. It gave me power, it made me part of what I own and where I am. It makes me feel good.
Were it not for the animal cruelty, Frank’s rituals, no matter how abject, might be the stuff of antic children’s games–playing war, building dams, shooting pellets at cans, and so forth. But the ritualized animal murders are part and parcel of Frank’s most sadistic crimes. He is a serial killer.
Frank confesses his crimes early in The Wasp Factory, and the Scribner trade paperback edition uses his confession as copy on the back of the book to entice would-be readers, so I don’t think I’ll spoil much by sharing it:
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. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again.
It was just a stage I was going through.
The punchline there at the end is indicative of the dark humor that pervades The Wasp Factory. The edition I’m quoting includes blurbs from negative reviews as well, again highlighting Banks’s mordant glee with the monster he’s conjured. “Rubbish!” declares The Times of London; “There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it,” warns The Scotsman.
Elsewhere, Banks’s humor is earthier, as when Frank recounts some of the early days of his homeschooling at the hands of his ex-hippy chemist father:
For years I believed Pathos was one of the Three Musketeers, Fellatio was a character in Hamlet, Vitreous a town in China, and that the Irish peasants had to tread the peat to make Guinness.
There’s also a sweet streak to the book as well as Frank himself, who, despite his psychotic behavior, is a genuinely caring person at times. His relationship to his only friend, a dwarf named Jamie, is damn near tender; Frank perches Jamie on his shoulders so that the latter can better see the awful punk bands at the local pub.
Frank also cares deeply for his older brother Eric. In the first line of the novel, we learn that Eric has “escaped”; we soon learn he’s escaped from a psychiatric ward he’d been sent to after terrorizing the town folk. Eric’s insane crimes also involve animal cruelty: burning local dogs; force-feeding children worms.
The plot of The Wasp Factory is actually quite simple: What will happen when Eric comes home? Banks keeps the pot boiling through a series of phone calls Eric makes to Frank. We come to see that while Frank might be a psychopath, he is not insane in the way that his older brother is. (A late reveal in the novel that explains the cause of Eric’s insanity is one of the most disgusting pieces of prose I’ve ever read (I write this in admiration.)) In the meantime, Frank attempts to break into the office door that his father has always kept locked.
These twin plots—prodigal son coming home, daddy’s secret locked door—drive the action of The Wasp Factory (oh, and Frank’s basement is full of explosive cordite, too). The book’s real weight comes not from the plot, but from Frank’s narration. He’s a perceptive intelligence, and tuning into his voice is by turns mesmerizing and horrifying.
Not everyone will enjoy The Wasp Factory, as I’ve tried to make as clear as possible in this review. To borrow from The Scotsman, “There’s nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it.” And even admirers may find the twist ending a bit dated and the final moments of Frank’s deep reflection a bit rushed. But Banks does give the reader a conclusion, when it might have been so much easier to leave his characters (and readers) in a noncommittal fuzz of ambiguity. There’s a point of view here, even if it disturbs. The Wasp Factory is a truly fucked up coming-of-age novel, an abject anti-Huckleberry Finn whose narrator makes Holden Caulfield seem perfectly well adjusted. Not for everyone, but I loved it. Recommended.
Biblioklept 