And, finally, the counter-argument to the cult of power through death, as Frank decides to leave the island and to try to live in the real world: I could also equate to Frank’s liking for bombs. My elder brother Ken made a bomb when he was about fourteen and blew up the pond in our garden. It was a quiet Sunday morning in England and all hell broke loose. My father shot out of bed, threw on his clothes and shoes, and chased Ken down the road. I laughed and laughed at the time. Can you imagine the end result? The Wasp Factory is a difficult read. Piecing together the truths –if there are any- from Frank’s narrative are nearly impossible. The only thing that remains clear is Frank’s hatred for women and the sea. The story is less about Frank’s relationship with Eric and more about Frank’s relationship with himself. In the end, Frank’s revelation and the author’s point is somewhat diluted by Frank’s own mental instability. Is any of this real?

what if Holden Caulfield was born on a remote Scottish Island into a disfunctional family, with a former anarchist for a father and a flower-power mother who ran away soon after he was born? Banks envisioned his angsty teenager character as a sort of alien living on a deserted planet, a translation of one of his science-fiction ideas. The object of the study is sanity and ethics when the individual is removed from the ordinary social interactions most of us take for granted. Dunno! Motives are bizarre sometimes? Cheap and easy entertainment? Fascination with vulgarity? I was bored at the airport and paid for it? People like violence, especially against women, children and animals. They like to be confronted with bodily functions and exact descriptions of drunken vomit. They like it in the way they like brutal computer games and stupid television shows." I hate having to sit down on the toilet all the time. With my unfortunate disability I usually have to, as thought I was a bloody woman, but I hate it. Sometimes in the Cauldhame Arms I stand up at the urinal, but most of it ends up running down my hands or legs." Francis Cauldhame is a monster, a sort of teenage Hannibal Lecter. He is also the narrator of this deranged fairytale, casually mentioning to the reader that he became a serial killer before his tenth anniversary...Banks, Iain (2 June 2010). "Letters: Small step towards a boycott of Israel". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 April 2013. In September 2012 Banks became a Guest of Honour at the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, Loncon 3. For lovers of the grotesque, there are some truly disgusting imagery in The Wasp Factory. The event which serves as the catalyst for Eric’s own descent into psychosis is among the best written passages to ever grace horror literature. Banks is to be commended for the work, but the ending loses much of its intended purpose. Frank is not a scion from which lessons can be learned and that leaves only the madness. Enjoy the journey.

Yes. True! I doubt we would see a father trying to change the gender of his child, though, and a murderer who proudly announces three completed murders before reaching adolescence, - using bombs, snakes and kites to kill off even younger children in the family - explaining it "with hindsight" at age seventeen as a "phase" he went through because of some very odd Freudian sexual issues and stereotypical misogyny!" Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Francesco Francavilla ‘Afterlife with Archie: Escape from Riverdale’ Review The next year's novel, The Bridge, featured three separate stories told in different styles: one a realist narrative about Alex, a manager in an engineering company, who crashes his car on the Forth road bridge; another the story of John Orr, an amnesiac living on a city-sized version of the bridge; and a third, the first-person narrative of the Barbarian, retelling myths and legends in colloquial Scots. In combining fantasy and allegory with minutely located naturalistic narrative, it was clearly influenced by Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981). It remained the author's own avowed favourite.

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My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made. And I’m not all that sure the Wind is blameless either”.

the Wasp Factory from the title, an artefact built by Frank and imbued with mystical, prophetic powers.Banks's The State of the Art, adapted for radio by Paul Cornell, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009 with Nadia Molinari producing and directing. [27] [28] In 1998 Espedair Street was dramatised as a serial for Radio 4, presented by Paul Gambaccini in the style of a Radio 1 documentary. The Wasp Factory is written from a first person perspective, told by 16-year-old Francis Cauldhame ("Frank"), describing his childhood and all that remains of it. Frank observes many shamanistic rituals of his own invention, and it is soon revealed that Frank killed three children before he reached the age of ten himself. In addition to Paul, Frank has murdered two other children. He killed his cousin Blyth, as revenge, after Blyth set Frank and Eric’s pet rabbits on fire. Frank also killed his cousin Esmerelda, not out of any particular dislike for her, but because he felt he had killed too many male children, and felt it essential to help restore balance to the world by killing a girl. Iain M Banks (5 April 2013). "Iain Banks: why I'm supporting a cultural boycott of Israel". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 April 2013. In 2010 he gave an interview to BBC Radio Scotland in which he spoke with painful frankness about the breakdown of his relationship with his first wife. But then the media interview seemed his natural forum: it is difficult to think of a more frequently interviewed British novelist.