‘I suppose I’ll have to tell him what’s happened to me.’ (1984, p. 104)
Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory is told from the POV of Frank Cauldhame, sixteen-year-old boy, who grows up home-schooled and isolated from the world because he does not have a birth certificate or national insurance card. We know that bureaucracy can be a pain in some countries, nevertheless, we are left in the dark until the very end of the book as to why Frank’s dad, Angus, would never get it sorted. The world Frank lives in is grey and morose, and through the isolation, he never learns to negotiate what it means to be away from home and in other social settings. Most children go through these stages when they first attend a kindergarten and later school where they are allowed to explore their identities outside their family life. If the home schooling against his will was not enough, how about some casual and very secret hormone therapy done on Frank without his consent? Thus, Angus, perhaps unknowingly, through his actions creates a dysfunctional child/teenager who has skipped crucial stages of Erikson’s development (Erikson, 1970). The outcome of going through these stages in a person who had a safe home environment and experiences traditional social engagements, is a ‘wide and integrated set of life skills and abilities that function together within the autonomous individual’ (Edwards, 2019). Frank, isolated and with an aloof father, experiences life in a different way.
‘I want to look dark and menacing; the way I ought to look, the way I should look, the way I might have looked if I hadn’t had my little accident. Looking at me, you’d never guess I’d killed three people. It isn’t fair.’ (1984, p. 20)
Angus plays another role in Frank’s developing character. By observing his father, Frank develops obsessions which have ‘a quality of pedantic order and rationality’ (Mullan, 2008). This is apparent in the Wasp Factory itself, an elaborate mechanism, which Frank uses to kill wasps in various ways. The manner in which they die then predict Frank’s victims’ deaths.
Through the first person POV, the reader becomes intimate with the inner thoughts of Frank. We discussed how it was especially intriguing to read about his plotting the murders and his feelings towards his brother, claiming Eric to be mad and himself to be sane. After we examined his actions further, we have concluded that Frank committed these heinous crimes as a child because he lacked the homelife where he could have felt successful. Most children would experience success at school through good grades and other accomplishments; while Frank was constantly quizzed by his father, he did not care or feel success because of the isolation he experienced. For him, these killings, and getting away with them (just like Dexter), were the successes he craved. During Erikson’s 4th stage – school age – children want to feel competent (Erikson, 1970).
Another pattern of the novel is Frank’s attempts to explain a mystery by trying to get into his father’s study at different intervals throughout the story. He hopes that one day the study doors would be left unlocked. ‘In the way of a fairy-tale or a gothic yarn, we know that we will enter this mysterious chamber before the novel ends’ (Mullan, 2008) and so, Frank, and the reader, finds out the truth through what I like to call an M. Night Shyamalan style twist ending. The revelation, in hindsight, makes complete sense. After Frank’s incident, the mother abandons them and Angus develops a hatred towards women and this hatred rubs off on Frank. Angus’ little experiment came to existence at this moment as well. ‘My [Frank’s] greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them…’ (1984, p. 43)
The book’s main appeal is its dark themes: violence, murders, secrets, identity crisis, the exploration of a psychopath’s mind. These themes in fiction must be balanced between the strange and the familiar according to Alec Austin (2002, p. 2). I believe, The Wasp Factory does a decent job balancing these elements. Adolescents will be able to identify with the insecurities Frank experiences and some readers will be familiar with the realities of a single-parent household. On the other hand, Frank’s murderous character will provide something new and bizarre. ‘Two years after I killed Blyth, I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmeralda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.’ (1984, p. 5).
Not only the themes are appealing, but also how the reader arrives at the twist. Although the book is short, it manages to pack a lot of action and revelations.
Starting with the matter-of-fact remark about the three murders (see quote above), what the title means, and his supposedly crazy brother, Eric, made me crave more. I wanted to explore each murder, I wanted to know what happened to Eric and whether the stories floating around him were true, and I wanted to explore the relationships between characters. I can see how this book with its dark themes could get some students into the habit of reading and discovering the joys of it too. If I was a teacher at a school whose curriculum included this book – highly unlikely, because although the book offers gender fluidity themes, these happen in a negative connotation -, I would create a court room activity, in which students would prosecute or defend either Frank or Angus.
Bibliography
Austin, A. (2002). Quality in Epic Fantasy. Retrieved 17 March 2019 from http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/quality-in-epic-fantasy
Banks, I. (1984). The Wasp Factory. [EBook]. London. Abacus.
Edwards, S. (2019, March 17). “Transcript for ‘The search for identity’”. Retrieved from https://hubl.hu.nl/session/search-identity?combi_course=778010
Erikson, E.H. (1970). Reflections on the dissent of contemporary youth., International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
Mullan, J. (2008, Jun 28). Behind it all. John Mullan on the use of explanation as a device in Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory. The Guardian. Retrieved 17 March 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/28/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview31
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