Recommended Reading: The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks is one of my very favourite authors, and the writer of whom I have read the most books. He is very 'readable', whilst also managing to write in a fascinating, compelling and original way. [And for those of you who like Sci-Fi, he even writes Science Fiction under a slightly different name, Iain M. Banks, which my wife tells me is fantastic too!] Click here to visit the author's own website.

The Wasp Factory is his first, shortest and, I guess, weirdest book - and, like some other novels I've recommended to you recently, is found on many an 'A' Level English Literature syllabus. (In fact, I taught it myself to some former George Mitchell students who studied 'A' Level with me in their spare time.) It is not a comfortable read, but it is pretty impossible to put down, and throws the reader into the strangest and most sinister of fantasy worlds imaginable. Best of all, it has an ending to beat almost any novel around. Just what is Frank's deepest, darkest secret of all?

If you want to read the opening to the novel, click here. Here are a few other extracts from the novel, to give you a taste of Frank's weird world:

I wanted to kill Blyth there and then; the hiding he got from his father, my dad's brother James, was not enough as far as I was concerned, not for what he'd done to Eric, my brother. Eric was inconsolable, desperate with grief because he had made the thing Blyth had used to destroy our beloved pets...

I hadn't said anything to anybody, even Eric, about what I wanted to do to Blyth. I was wise in my childishness even then, at the tender age of five, when most children are forever telling their parents and friends that they hate them and they wish they were dead. I kept quiet.

* * * * * *

My brother Paul was five when I killed him. I was eight. It was over two years after I had subtracted Blyth with an adder that I found an opportunity to get rid of Paul. Not that I bore him any personal ill-will; it was simply that I knew he couldn't stay...

I always got on well with Paul. Perhaps because I knew from an early age that he was not long for this world, I tried to make his time in it as pleasant as possible, and thus ended up treating him far better than most young boys treat their younger brothers.

* * * * * *

I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. My cousin was simply the easiest and most obvious target.

Again, I bore her no personal ill-will. Children aren't real people, in the sense that they are not small males and females but a separate species which will (probably) grow into one or the other in due time. Younger children in particular, before the insidious and evil influence of society and their parents have properly got to them, are sexlessly open and hence perfectly likeable.

* * * * * *

That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again.

It was just a stage I was going through.