Review: The Wasp Factory in 2024

40 years on, Iain Banks's transgressive masterpiece still hits home

It’s been well over a decade, maybe two, since I last tried to read The Wasp Factory by Iain (no M) Banks. The first time around, I think I stole my brother’s copy after reading some of Banks’s likewise grim and inventive science fiction Culture novels, but according to my memories, I never finished it.

Rereading it, I can see a few reasons I might not have done at the time; it was weird, and it was full of grotesque animal abuse and was clearly more in that mainstream/literary fiction avenue that at that point in my life, I just was not especially interested in.

I think this last reason is the most likely culprit, as I was more invested in genre material at the time. I remember liking the book, and I remember finding the wild gothic honesty of the animal cruelty repulsive and engaging, but I also remember not feeling that thriller impetus to keep turning the page. This had extended to the Culture novels too; there was no faulting Banks’s nuts and bolts with prose, his confidence in injecting humour, and the impressive nature of his imagination; yet at the same time, I didn’t feel much of a need to turn the page and would often not get much of a mental image of the Culture worlds while reading.

I would enjoy the big ideas and of course the intense violence and sadism that creeps into his work, but each work would contain an effort of will to make myself care about the characters in ways the other authors I was reading in that era (Terry Pratchett!) were more… effectively propulsive.

All that said, I made an oath to one day go back and finish it.

Skip ahead to 2024, when I’m writing my own severely gothic WIP, a ‘literary epic fantasy’ with its own reams of grotesquerie, gothic atmosphere, murdered animals and humans aplenty, and a very northern English take on a psychopathic antihero. Reading the Wasp Factory now, I see that probably shares more with Banks’s lasting, Scottish, unconscious impact in my formative years than the works of writers who I came across later like GRRM and HP Lovecraft.

I remembered my oath to myself when reading the wikipedia entry for the book and realised that now, MA in hand, I had the literary reading chops to tackle more mainstream works and think more in terms of themes and multifunctional prose, as well as be able to take more information in. (NB. I still like Pratchett, Marvel and WWE lore, so I continue to fail on the elitist snob front, soz.)

The Actual Book

(Spoilers ahoy.)

In this review I will use he and she pronouns for Frank, depending on where in the narrative my perspective is talking from, so it will be he for most content except for the ending and the assumption that we, you and I, are talking from an understanding that the ending is established as historic and we are understanding Frank more generally. Annoyingly, I also deadname Frances as Frank because that’s who he/she is for most of the book, so I’m probably criticisable by my own woke moralist standards. Whatever!

This stuff is a bit confusing but hopefully you understand what I mean.

The writing

On the whole I loved it, and I remembered what really appealed to me the first time round. The island, first introduced to us in terms of the Sacrifice Poles, the grisly wards that Frank uses as part of his unique occult death magick were of course, very gothic, dripping atmosphere on this remote island somewhere off the coast of Scotland. We learn of the imminence of Frank’s dangerous brother Eric, the harsh natural landscape and the occult weirdness and the unusual family dynamic that drive the narrative right from the off, and this all suggests that the book is far tighter than I remembered.

The ending works well, for the most part, with a few provisos. The buildup to a dupe showdown is a difficult thing to write, but Banks manages it and I was forced to think about why. The set up is strong; Eric is nightmarish and unpredictable, and things build, including the an appropriately gothic thunderstorm for the showdown. In the abstract, the subversion of the could’ve squandered the tension, but what the book does masterfully is switch the main focus away from tension around Eric and throws us into why Frank is the way he, and then she, is, and using this as a way to re-perceive Frank’s prior misogyny and tendency towards fucked up behaviour, be it murdering animals or constructing wild occult systems of violence and suffering to protect himself and divine order from the chaos and confusion of life and his assigned gender, enforced by a lunatic patriarch who lies about everything.

The text itself shifting the conflict to Frank’s interior world, his/her body and the lies from a terrible authority are engaging and avoid the peaceful resolution of Frank and Eric feeling anticlimactic.

The prose and language choices were, of course, impeccable. The book gives an excellent sense of place. Time and character age, however, was a bit more sketchy. I'm guessing late 70s, 80s due to punk bands existing. When we find out Frank was a young adult I was surprised; I had thought he was a child until we get to him and his friend in the pub.

Moral themes

I think this book does have a moral argument to make on the importance of truth in defining who you are and your relationship with the world. It argues that by contrast, lies, abuse and manipulation lead to chaos, cruelty, suffering and weird and unpredictable overcompensation.

I disagree somewhat with the denoument suggesting everything about Frank’s weirdness should be attributed to her being trapped within her father’s lies. I do not think that amount of tabula rasa, the ‘monster created by environment’ reading can make sense from the descriptions of her early life. Damage beyond the gender torment inflicted by the father, or perhaps some innate darkness accounts for that much more than the Psycho-esque (1960, Hitchcock), which has always been seen as, dare I say it, problematic.

Of course, Banks was writing in 1984 and the past is a different country, but it is a trope that is worthy of note. In this book, as with Psycho, where enforced transgender identity is key to the climactic twist, it comes extremely close to being accused of being the cause kf, and certainly associated with, murderous actions. Of course, Psycho came out a quarter century before The Wasp Factory was published.

All that said, I especially loved Frank’s completely batshit occultism. It’s a short read, too, only 184 pages. There is a ton of peculiarity and interest, even for readers who feel like they've become jaded.

Trans issues

I think if I were writing The Wasp Factory in 2024, I would've handled the transgender issues differently, not just for fear of woke mob cancellation or whatever, but because I think understanding of gender has moved on in general. It would've made more sense for me as a hypothetical writer to focus on a persistent inexplicable wrongness about himself and the world that Frank feels up until the realisation in the climax.

The David Reimer case was a gender-swapped real-world example of the experiment that the father forces on Frank. In the real-world equivalent, psychologist John Money suggested that the infant and intersex Reimer, whose genitals had been butchered and lost due to a poorly performed circumcision, be reassigned to a girl and be raised as one without him knowing anything otherwise.

Money believed gender was malleable in the first years of life, and that female gender affirmation would ‘take’ and then got progressively weirder to try and make it stick, including (allegedly) coercing Reimer and his brother into sexualised role-play. Suffice it to say, Reimer was made miserable by Money’s pseudoscientific abuse and knew something was wrong with his gender, later voluntarily transitioning back to male. Sadly, Reimer and his brother would later go on to commit suicide.

I imagine a lot of the research around transgenderism and David Reimer wasn't available in the early eighties, so we should cut Banks some slack, while also admitting that the text itself, along with some notions in his extended Culture novels suggest a more neutral position on gender while also being broadly supportive of personal agency.

Within the Culture novels, people can change sex at will, suggesting that Banks conceived of gender as essentially interchangeable or perhaps less phenomenal than contemporary mainstream views on gender. In this novel, Frank was female all along and did not detect that something was off, no real body schema dysphoria except for embarrassment over missing male genitals.

In 2024

If there are moral notes to be made about this book in 2024, I would point to the last decade as an era of constant moral panics about trans people, the ridiculous parody of stoicism promoted by the manosphere corrupting young boys, and the destruction of the environment by these endlessly lying, patriarchal cancerous weirdos we can’t seem to ignore as a society.

Of course, I don’t think it’s written as an allegory, but it’s perhaps something to consider when throwing the book’s ideas around and discussing their relevance.

It’s a dark, immaculately written modern literary gothic horror that stands up with significant moral lessons in 2024.