The WASP FACTORY: A NOVEL

In one word: (excellently) weird! Children are supposed to be cute, benign, adorable. Not on this Scottish island though! Three down, one on its way, yet another kid briliantly wicked. Wasps, vipers, and dogs! of course. The book finishes in style.

Banks' first novel is a well-written if disturbing tale that ends with a surprise you never saw coming. Was definitely a good indication of the great work he produced until his death earlier this year.

This is, by far, on of my favorite novels. Everything from the first person narrative to the impeccably crafted plot twist made this novel engaging and successful. The Wasp Factory is a unique glimpse into the human psychie that challenges notions of childhood curiosity and gender constructs.

I was hooked almost immediately. From the beginning the chief protagonist, from whose point of view the story is told, reminded me of someone I knew for many years. While my friend, who is sadly deceased, was certainly not so extreme in her behavior, so many of the attitudes, ideas and perspectives portrayed in the book were just like hers: she had Asperger's Syndrome. Frank is a fascinating character, and I was delighted with the twist in the tale, one that I did see coming. Highly recommended.

Like Iain I am from Edinburgh, Scotland. Unfortunately I had never read any of Iain's work until he had made public that he had terminal. Sadly he lost his fight against the disease. I bought this book, and loved it. It was very well written. As Iain's first book, it wasn't difficult to see why he became such a successful author. I look forward to reading his final book.

I really hate all the subject matter in this book. The end was very lame but there were interesting twists and turns getting there. I put this book down for more than a week when I got to some really disturbing torture descriptions. The writing was interesting and I might enjoy a different kind of book from this author.

I burned the book as soon as I finished reading it. I don't want anybody in my family reading it and I don't want anybody in my family knowing I read it. I pass on all my books after I read them. Not this one.

If you are sensitive to animal torture, just pass, do not read this book. Some of the images are burned on my brain. Yes, I use the word 'burn' many times, that should give you an idea of what you do not want to read about.

This book is brilliant, full stop. It is polarizing and controversial without a doubt, but most good writing is. The character exploration here is fascinating, The plot is enthralling. The end is perfect. I literally could not put this book down--it came with me into every room of my house and even to work until I'd finished it. Delicious.

Although a talented writer, Banks strives too hard to shock the reader, rather than stick to his story. Some of the dark humor is quite clever, but by the end of the "novel," you'll realize it's just been a waste of your time...

The kid thought his dog ate his testicles, what a great story. The killing of the girl with the kite was stupid, Snake in the prosthetic leg not much better, finding out about the wasp factor was pretty cool.

Not scary, not shocking, kinda boring. The author could have done a lot more with this book but either didn't try for themes or was just lazy. I kept reading for this "twist" ending, but it ended up being what pissed me off most about the book.

4.5 stars

Iain Banks' first novel, "The Wasp Factory," introduces us to Frank Cauldhame, a 16 year old misfit living on an island off the coast of Scotland with his deeply idiosyncratic father. Frank doesn't officially exist - he has never been registered in any way with the government - and in his isolation, he's constructed an intricate world where he can do pretty much as he pleases. In his youth, Frank killed three people, including one of his brothers, but he's no raving lunatic - he's a highly organized psychopath.

We meet Frank on a day when his older brother Eric has escaped from the asylum where he's been confined. A former medical student, Eric had suffered a mental break and deteriorated into an abuser of children and animals, particularly dogs, which he still enjoys capturing and setting ablaze. Now, Eric is making his way home - to "visit" - and Frank is both thrilled at the prospect of seeing one of the only people with whom he's ever been close, and troubled at the chaos that his sibling is likely to bring to the ordered world where Frank maintains his power.

Banks writes very well, with a distinctive style that gives Frank his own voice, and which also manages to make the young killer - or former killer, as Frank would tell you - both interesting and, in many ways, sympathetic. The cold, cruel streak that permeates Frank's life and the novel itself, is masterfully balanced with black humor and a sense of wonder as we grow to understand how the main character sees the world around him.

"The Wasp Factory" is a love-it or hate-it book. Readers will either let themselves fall into the rhythm of the novel or be repelled at its descriptions of casual brutality. The twist at the end of the story is fantastic, but it's also the one area in which the author falters a bit - straying into the realm of over-explication. Nonetheless, "The Wasp Factory" is a standout work of fiction, and it marks the the debut of tremendously talented author.

This is a dark, violent book. Centered on a trouble youth growing up in self-imposed isolation on an island with his father, "The Wasp Factory" depicts the sadistic acts and thoughts of a troubled teen named Frank who leaves a history of death and destruction in his wake, a devastating trail of mayhem that Frank proudly describes and embraces. Frank's brother Eric, who has a troubled history himself, has just escaped from some sort of institution and his return to the secluded home of Frank and his father serves as the impending event which drives the action in this story.
Cruelty against animals, and humans, explosions, fires, even murder populate the pages of "The Wasp Factory" and at times it is a hard book to continue reading because of this. Thankfully, author Banks has a method to his madness and if the reader is able to stomach the atrocities that never seem to stop coming, the concluding pages provide a narrative revealing that one, should definitely come as a surprise, and two, which provides some degree of validation for all that proceeds it.
Short, intense, disturbing, but ultimately unforgettable, "The Wasp Factory" is a daring and bold first novel from an author that would continue to distinguish himself in later works. If you like your novels violent and non-apologetically brutal, then this is the book for you.

This book gets three stars from mainly for its ending. The ending is a bit of a surprise, but on reflection, little details are dropped throughout.

Never have I ever read a book where there are such three ugly and evil characters--our unreliable narrator who has already committed 3 murders by the age of 16; the father whose cruelty is exposed at the end; and the brother, Eric, who ever since an incident training as an MD is now very fond of burning animals alive. While the characters are reprehensible, they are quite well developed. Bank's style is engaging and engrossing.

The plot unravels towards the end of the book though, the climax and denouement are unexpected (no problem there), but also highly unbelievable.

As to genre, some reviews have classed this book as a coming of age story (hardly I would say). or horror (in a way it is with the setting and the rituals the narrator performs).

My favorite novel, and reason is because it says so much in so few pages.

I think a lot of the people who gave poor reviews to this book did so on a superficial level. They were maybe cynical about the fact that the book contains violence against animals or that the main character displays an explicit grudge against women (which begins resolution in the book). I think if a person analyzes the book, they will find that what may seem as noir episodes of violence actually serve important plot features. For example, Frank might take violent revenge on rabbits as part of his ritualistic requirements born out of untreated Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but this is relevant to his later criticisms of organized religion and indiscriminate violence of standing armies several chapters later.

Similarly, Frank and his father have a lot of apparent distance early in the book. As part of resolving the "coming of age" conflict, you later that find they are very similar in many ways and love each other very much. They just have different ways of sharing it.

So if you're interested in a book that has a lot of themes and gives you a lot to analyze, this is an awesome book.

The author was SO CLOSE to writing a really great, freaky, deeply disturbing novel. But he didn't quite get there. There were so many ways this novel could have gone! The Dad could have been building a bomb in his study that he keeps locked, and waited for his two twisted sons to return under one roof and then set off the bomb, destroying them in fire. The two brothers could have really been switched at birth, or after the "accident" and changed identities, with one brother covering for the other one. The ending was unexpected, but not brilliant.

I wish the author would have taken the darkness a little further and delved further into insanity and the family history, with all the strange deaths showing a pattern of insanity. The mother running off and leaving her children could have been due to her fear of their dark deeds, and her ultimate demise caused by one or the other, then hidden by the father in remorse. Ahhhhh. Iain! Come on! You were so close!

Instead, you get a twisted, dark, disturbing tale that never really has that finale you are craving.

A very dark, macabre, insane, unsettling and disturbing book. How do you rate something like this? It certainly can't be described as enjoyable. Then why couldn't I put the damn thing down?! Why did I allow myself to be drawn in to the violence, even as I'm trying to imagine what could possibly drive someone to do such sick things? If I said I thought this book was simply outstanding, what does that say about me? Ah, damn it! enough with the questions. I'm going to rate it 5* and I'll worry about the state of my mental health later!

Iain Banks passed away from cancer in June 2013, aged 59. The Wasp Factory was the Scottish author's first novel and it has become his most famous. A 1997 poll of over 25,000 readers listed The Wasp Factory as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century. It is also included in the 1,001 book challenge. When it was first released, the book was initially greeted with a mixture of acclaim and controversy, due to its gruesome depiction of violence. Banks dealt with the controversy brilliantly however by placing a selection of reviews, good and bad, on the inside cover. The Times Literary Supplement’s verdict, “A literary equivalent of the nastiest brand of juvenile delinquency”, was proudly displayed alongside The Financial Times’ “Macabre, bizarre, and impossible to put down”. A reviewer for the Irish Times wrote "It is incomprehensible that a publisher could have stooped to such levels of depravity".

The Wasp Factory is written from a first person perspective, told by sixteen-year-old Frank Cauldhame. Frank is a psychopath. He has a penchant for violence and killing, small animals mostly, but he also killed three younger children before he was ten. As he describes it: "[…] That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and I don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.” Frank’s life is dominated by his strict adherence to personal rituals and totems—the wasp factory, built from an old clock face, being the most significant. To Frank, the wasp factory guides him through life. Frank has one surviving half-brother, Eric, whom we are informed is crazy, after experiencing something very unpleasant while working in a hospital. It is Eric’s escape from the asylum that precipitates the action of the novel.

This is a brilliant, caustic, breath-taking novel that will not appeal to all. As is evident by critics, this book has scared the bejesus out of some, sickened others and captured fandom of a great many. With respect to the latter, the Wasp factory recently made its debut at the Bregenz Festival in Austria and will be showing at the Royal Opera House in London in October 2013. Yes, you've read right, it has been transformed into gripping music theatre.

If you have a tolerance for violence and madness, I urge you to read this book. If for nothing else, the twist in its tail is simply fantastic.

This book seriously weirded and creeped me out. It's the first novel by Iain Banks, who is also Iain M. Banks, a very different writer. Iain M. Banks writes very cerebral Big Idea science fiction. Iain Banks, based on this, writes ... I don't know what to call it. It's technically a realistic novel, but if it were to be marketed as horror I don't think anyone would argue the point.

Our viewpoint character is Frank Cauldhame, a sixteen-year-old in the early '80s with some serious problems: but then, his family has problems left and right. Living on an island in Scotland, Frank has never been to school. Further, he's never seen a doctor other than his own father, who is technically a doctor but without a practice -- and an ex-hippy. Frank is not registered with the government, he has no legal existence.

And the rest of it is much weirder.

Frank has made up his own mythology by which he attempts acts of magic and divination. There is no reason for the reader to believe these acts actually work -- this is not a fantasy novel -- but Frank believes it.

Then there's Frank's brother, Eric, who is in the loonybin for setting fire to dogs.

And various dead relatives who, no, do not show up, but do play an important part in the story. After all, Frank killed three of them himself.

If you are beginning to get the idea that this is not a normal family, you're right on the money, and it keeps getting weirder as the story progresses, right up to the end.

I don't know if I actually recommend it, because I don't know many people who would like it, but I loved it.

Prolific Banks's first published novel is a doozy -- a first-person narrative with an obsessive-compulsive, sociopathic 16-year-old Scot as the narrator. Our narrator Frank lives with his dotty, obsessive-compulsive father on a small island connected by a landbridge to the nearby mainland. He doesn't go to school and, indeed, believes that he doesn't legally exist as his father has told him that no record of his birth was ever filed with the government.

Frank enjoys making explosives, killing animals, making fetishes out of the dead bodies of animals, building dams, getting drunk with a friendly dwarf and, oh, killing relatives -- three of them, to be exact, from when he was six to when he was about ten. He's a barrel of laughs, our Frank, though his somewhat demented consciousness can sometimes make a reader doubt the veracity of, well, everything in the novel -- the means of Frank's murders are so odd and so baroque and, in one case, so reliant on chance that one really does wonder just how reliable a narrator Frank really is.

Frank and his father await the return of Frank's institutionalized older brother, who went mad years ago and now, having escaped the institution, is moving inexorably towards home, leaving a trail of fires and dead, partially devoured dogs along the way. Frank consults the oracular rituals that he himself has invented (including the eponymous device, which we don't actually see in operation until very late in the novel), sets up defenses both psychic and real, and repeatedly tries to gain entrance to his father's locked office, in which he believes the answers to all the mysteries of his life reside.

Banks's troubled yet oddly sympathetic teenaged narrator evokes similar highly intelligent, ultra-violent narrators, perhaps most notably John Gardner's Grendel in Grendel and Anthony Burgess's Alex in A Clockwork Orange (though 'Frank' could also be an homage to the equally screwed-up, equally high-intelligence creation of Victor Frankenstein, the original first-person narrative of misanthropic creations and creators).

The violence and graphic horror are shocking, enough so that I ended up musing that this is the novel the kids of South Park thought they'd be getting when they were instead handed the "shocking and controversial" A Catcher in the Rye, which subsequently bored the kids so much that they concocted their own shocking novel, The Tale of Scrotty McBoogerballs. Highly recommended, but certainly not for the squeamish.

Even thinking about this soul destroying book makes me feel icky. I recommend that you do not read it. I dont want to go into why, because I dont want to think about this book again and I wish I had not read it.

According to his introduction to The Wasp Factory, Mr Banks has always considered himself a sci-fi writer. However to break into publishing he penned this 'literary' novel against his genre preferences.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

The result is a rather confusing tale - narrated by an apparent young man, we hear about a semi-neglectful father an insane brother and 3 murder victims of the protagonist.

The majority of the story is spun around Frank's permanently perturbed skull as he pontificates on his past, his 'escaped' brother and his father.

The conclusion - a gender bending twist does little to explain the dysfunction of Bank's world aside from offering an extreme cause, and with the only tension of the novel being 'what is wrong with these people' its hard to feel satisfied about such a book.

Only recommended for hardcore Ian Bank's fans.

The Wasp Factory is the first novel by Scottish author, Iain Banks, and has been listed as one of the top 100 novels of the century by The Independent. Seventeen year old Frank L. Cauldhame is the second child of Angus Cauldhame, a somewhat reclusive doctor living on a firth island by the Scottish coast. Frank, by his own admission, has murdered three people and his brother Eric is in a mental hospital for setting fire to dogs and terrorising young children. As Frank narrates, almost emotionlessly, the events that occur after Eric escapes, it becomes quickly apparent that this resourceful youth is seriously disturbed. This novel has been described as brilliant and compelling, but also as rubbish. Banks has a brilliant imagination and knows how to make the reader gasp and squirm. All rather bizarre.

This book totally disturbed me. I actually had a hard time reading it. I wanted to read it to find out where it was going but at the same time I felt uncomfortable while doing so. If you have a hard time reading about animal cruelty or children being murdered, then don't read this book. If you like a book that just might make you squirm while you read it, then you will want to read this one.
It's about a boy, Frank, who became a serial killer at a very young age. To many others he seemed mostly normal on the outside but through the book you get to delve into his mind. There you find that he is a smart kid but very weird in his thinking. Not only is he mentally unstable but his brother is too and his dad doesn't seem quite all there either. As the book goes along you see really how disturbed this boy is and his brother as well. I think that was the part that bothered me the most. The way the author described Frank's daily life and thoughts was quite disturbing. I've read fictional books on serial killers, murderers, etc but no one seemed to get really into their twisted mind as this author did. Made me wonder how stable Iain Banks might be... lol. A very good book but it's not for everyone.