The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks (1984, Macmillan)

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

Frank Cauldhame lives on a small island off the Scottish coast with his reclusive father. Frank believes he was castrated as a toddler by the family dog, and has developed a complex and violent series of rituals to shore himself up. But now his older brother Eric - unhinged by witnessing a terrible case of neglect - is on his way home, and Frank is about to learn some horrifying truths.

The Wasp Factory was Iain Banks’ first novel. He had always seen himself as a writer of science fiction but had been unable to get any of it published, so made a conscious decision to turn his hand to sensational literary fiction. Achieving a wild success would, he reasoned, mean he could get paid for writing about spaceships.

It bloody worked, possibly better than Banks could have imagined. There were a lot of young (and old) men affronting the bookish bourgeoisie in the early ‘80s - Martin Amis’ Money and Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine were both published in 1984 too - and Banks was careful to be shocking and wise to be brutal. The Wasp Factory was an immediate and massive hit. It was criticised for its violence and grand guignol horror, but it was undeniably compulsive with quite the twist at the end, and the controversy only drove more coverage. It was absolute catnip for a certain kind of reader, one who largely no longer exists. There were a lot of books like The Wasp Factory in the early ‘80s: readable but not pulp, well written but not art, tricksy but not subtle. It is precisely the sort of midlist novel that has been killed by the internet.

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Contents (and spoilers)

The Wasp Factory is narrated by the sixteen-year-old Frank, who is a threefold unreliable narrator. First because he is a teenager, and thus intrinsically unreliable as a narrator of himself; second because his world is constructed by ritual and quasi-religious symbol, which like all symbolism is fluid and subject to interpretation; and third because he has been so comprehensively lied to about his world that he cannot describe it accurately.

Part of the book’s success is down to a reveal that is whisked out as a twist in the last few pages. Frank had not been castrated by the family dog. He had not had a penis in the first place: he was a born a girl, not Francis but Frances. His father has been slipping him male hormones and lying to him in order to bring him up as male.

But that happens right at the end, and while it’s a part of the book’s appeal - and was genuinely jaw-dropping for the average reader in 1984 - most of the book is an account of how Frank responds to the emasculation he believes he has suffered. This is where most of the book’s horror lies, and the bulk of its interest for the reader.

Frank builds up gothic, bloody rituals focussed on weapons and death, but he also literally builds material constructions. These include the eponymous ‘wasp factory’, a miniature maze of death made out of junk that Frank has found in the local tip. He feeds it with captured wasps who blunder through it in a panic, effectively choosing their own modes of execution:

If it falls into the many charged spikes of the Volt Room, I can watch the insect get zapped; if it trips the Deadweight, I can watch it get crushed and ooze; and, if it stumbles through to the Blade Corridor, I can see it chopped and writhe.

Frank’s self-created religion is operatically violent and cartoonishly masculine: ‘My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate.’ Writing about the book decades later, Banks said his intention was to write ‘a pro-feminist, anti-militarist work, satirising religion and commenting on the way we’re shaped by our surroundings and upbringing and the usually skewed information we’re presented with by those in power.’

It was unusual then for violent and dynamic popular fiction to come from an openly progressive stance. Re-reading it now, though, you can see that the satire doesn’t quite work. Frank's religion is weird and bloody indeed, but also entirely self-created, not imposed. He is as sceptical and self-conscious of it as he is devout and punctilious. And the critique of the performance of gender and what we would call today ‘toxic masculinity’ is anything but subtle, leading to an absolute clunker of a last line: ‘Poor Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap! Pow! Dams burst! Bombs go off! Wasps fry: ttssss!) he’s got a sister.’

The Wasp Factory is a young man’s book, not just in the sense that Banks was a young man and still learning his craft when he wrote it, or in the sense that a lot of young men read it in the ‘80s. It is also a young man’s book in the sense that it is like a young man, full of daring and disgust and self-aggrandisement that is ultimately somewhat meaningless and more than a little annoying.

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Afterword

Banks did, in the end, persuade someone to pay him to write about spaceships. After three more ‘literary’ books - Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986) and Espedair Street (1987) - he published Consider Phlebas (1987) and introduce us to his sci-fi setting, The Culture, a post-scarcity galaxy-wide meta-civilisation of luxury space communism. He continued writing sci-fi under the name of Iain M. Banks in tandem with his literary career.

The Wasp Factory isn’t much talked about these days, but his sci-fi is. In fact, as sci-fi has a habit of doing, it has started to leak out into the real world. Elon Musk has named several of his SpaceX vehicles after Banks’ spaceships, including ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ and ‘Just Read The Instructions’. (The spaceships in Banks’ novels are named by the artificially intelligent Minds that control them, often sarcastically and/or whimsically.)

This kind of thing is some small compensation for the fact that Banks died, far too young, of cancer in 2013. How painful, to see the militantly egalitarian social justice warriors of The Culture non-consensually co-opted by an alt-right-curious billionaire. One supposes that fans like Musk or Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have been bedazzled by Banks’ techno-optimism and entirely missed the socialist underpinnings of his utopia.

As Banks himself said (interviewed by Jude Roberts in Strange Horizons magazine): ‘I pretty much despise American libertarianism… Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, “Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness?” …Which bit of not having private property, and the absence of money in the Culture novels, have these people missed?’

Banks says that he thought of The Wasp Factory as a sci-fi book manqué, in which Frank was an alien and his island a strange new world. But his portraits and satires of society were much more successful when he returned to the genre he’d always preferred. It was science fiction that allowed him to think about humans clearly, and allowed space for a more subtle and expansive exposition of his satire and his philosophy.

And the spaceships are much cooler than the wasp factory.

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For more Iain Banks, how the influence on him by the computer game Civilization?