Book 40: "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks
Saturday, September 11th, 2010 09:53![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeWhen I was younger I used to have fantasies about saving the house by building a dam. There would be a fire in the grass on the dunes, or a plane would have crashed, and all that stopped the cordite in the cellar from going up would be me diverting some of the water from a dam system down a channel and into the house. At one time my major ambition was to have my father buy me an excavator so that I could make really big dams. But I have a far more sophisticated, even metaphysical, approach to dam-building now. I realise that you can never really win against the water; it will always triumph in the end, seeping and soaking and building up and undermining and overflowing. All you can really do is construct something that will divert it or block its way for a while; persuade it to do something it doesn't really want to do. The pleasure comes from the elegance of the compromise you strike between where the water wants to go (guided by gravity and the medium it's moving over) and what you want to do with it.
I read "The Wasp Factory" back in the 80s, soon after it came out, and looked forward to reading it again when it was chosen for the on-line book club I belong to. So I ordered it from the library and when it arrived I read it within a couple of days as it is nice and short at just 244 pages long.
I was surprised at how little of the story I remembered. All I really remembered was the main twist (including the contents of the jar , why Frank's father did all the cooking and Frank going to the pub with a friend but being unable to use the urinals properly). I had forgotten that Frank's family lived on an island, what happened to his little brother and cousins and everything that went on with his older brother (although I remembered about the child in the hospital ward as I was reading it). I remembered that Frank was odd, but had completely forgotten about his rituals and liking for blowing things up. I also remembered Frank thinking about which of the adults in his life, such as the housekeeper and his aunts and uncles, must have known the secret, but this does not actually happen in the book, and must be something that I thought about when I first read it.
Incidentally, years ago, when a row of buildings opposite the Nottingham Central Library was being renovated, the hoarding around the site had various quotations from books painted on it, including one for The Wasp Factory that completely gave away the secret at the heart of the story. Luckily it was after I had read it, but I still found it really irritating!
I read "The Wasp Factory" back in the 80s, soon after it came out, and looked forward to reading it again when it was chosen for the on-line book club I belong to. So I ordered it from the library and when it arrived I read it within a couple of days as it is nice and short at just 244 pages long.
I was surprised at how little of the story I remembered. All I really remembered was the main twist (including the contents of the jar , why Frank's father did all the cooking and Frank going to the pub with a friend but being unable to use the urinals properly). I had forgotten that Frank's family lived on an island, what happened to his little brother and cousins and everything that went on with his older brother (although I remembered about the child in the hospital ward as I was reading it). I remembered that Frank was odd, but had completely forgotten about his rituals and liking for blowing things up. I also remembered Frank thinking about which of the adults in his life, such as the housekeeper and his aunts and uncles, must have known the secret, but this does not actually happen in the book, and must be something that I thought about when I first read it.
Incidentally, years ago, when a row of buildings opposite the Nottingham Central Library was being renovated, the hoarding around the site had various quotations from books painted on it, including one for The Wasp Factory that completely gave away the secret at the heart of the story. Luckily it was after I had read it, but I still found it really irritating!
