I am a sucker for psychos. I admit it – it’s like a poison. I seem to have some sort of soft spot for the lunatics of the world, yet I extend no greater patience to people’s everyday stupidities.
I love to find an author who can make an absolute bona fide nutcase look absolutely sane within the delusional confines of his own mind. The best example of this kind of character is, of course, my personal favorite, Patrick Bateman of Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho” fame.
Well, I have now found another favorite in Iain Bank’s “The Wasp Factory”. This book is considered by some to be the British equivalent of “American Psycho” and, to a certain extent, I agree. The portrait of the main character’s insanity is splendidly painted across the pages of this rather short book (200 pages) and we are effectively swept away on a journey inside a broken mind through a dramatic turn of events.
In Bank’s book, we travel inside Frank; a youth who lives alone with his strange father on a little sandy wind-pined island off the coast of Scotland. We follow him around his daily chores, which include fighting the roaring ocean, tending to the dried seagull skulls on the watch poles, making household bombs, meditating by the skull of Old Saul and, most importantly, sacrificing live wasps to the Factory in the old loft to help him predict future events.
Through a pretty simple tale of a rather twisted young man’s anticipation of his brother’s imminent return home – a brother who has just escaped the mental ward which he was committed to after setting fire to all the dogs in town – we are told the story of young Frank’s life, through his reflections and memories from childhood. And, believe me, this kid had a busy childhood. “Portrait of a Young Ted Bundy” would also have been an apt title for this book. I will, of course, not go into detail about the wheres, whens, whos and whys, but will suffice to say that Frank’s almost charming and quirky delusions that we see at first, later on rapidly unravel a deeply disturbed mind that you can’t help but be absolutely fascinated by at the end of the book.
I have always liked the way Bank creates a cutting edge and humorous dialogue between characters in his books (I would recommend “The Business”), but here in “The Wasp Factory” he has also woven together a theme of incredibly credible insanity and how well a mad person operates in his own little crazy world when left to his own devices. You can’t help but feel sympathetic to Frank as he struggles with his own thoughts when he sometimes wonders whether he is absolutely fucking insane or just odd. The fact that he doesn’t care either way is what makes it great – he just wants to know for his own peace of mind.
All in all… not another “American Psycho” unless you draw the parallels between the deranged main characters and their disrespect for all things living, but rather a complex and rewarding fast read about the darker walks of life some people who wander among us travel in their own minds. One of the more disturbing scenes in the book didn’t bother me while reading it, but I find my thoughts returning to it ever so often, making me flinch every time. That’s a good thing.
A great read and I highly recommend it… if you’re anything like me… and let’s hope, for all our sakes, that you’re not.
"The Wasp Factory"
by
Iain Banks
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~ The Red Collar Report ~
