The publication of Bankes’s first novel in the mid-80s was greeted with mixed reviews. Every critic recognises its goriness, but while some see it as a signifier of a ‘mighty imagination,’ others find it too distasteful to be enjoyable – the Sunday Express called it ‘the lurid literary equivalent of a video nasty.’ Reading The Wasp Factory as a child of the 90s, having been exposed to goriness by GoldenEye and Grand Theft Auto and every horror movie since, the violence of the novel does not seem at all extraordinary.
The plot follows a Scottish teenager who has spent his whole life on an island with his father, who never registered his son’s birth and teaches him at home. As a result of his unusual upbringing, Frank, the son, is himself extremely unusual; when he’s not catapulting hamsters into the sea, or exploding rabbit burrows, or consulting the eponymous Wasp Factory, he’s binge drinking with his only friend, a dwarf from the mainland.
As the novel progresses, Frank tells us more about his life: exactly how he killed three children in his lifetime, and why it is dangerous that his older brother has escaped from a mental hospital and is making his way home. Easy going it isn’t – but the plot is original, the narrative gripping and the narrator strangely likeable (once you get past the fact that he’s a child murderer).