The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

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A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. The book has appeared on a number of greatest horror lists and in a poll was even named one of the top 100 novels of the century. In 2013, the Australian producer and composer Ben Frost directed an opera adaptation of the Iain Banks novel, in which all characters are represented by three female singers. Lloyd recorded Banks for including in the play as a disembodied voice of himself in one of the cast member's dreams. Frank’s brother, Eric, was hospitalized several years earlier after a mental breakdown that caused him to become violent and dangerous.

Quote: '"It's a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity," wrote this newspaper's reviewer. Like The Crow Road and The Steep Approach to Garbadale –it is the story of a man coming back to his family home, and it is difficult not to think that this is Banks's story of himself.The event which serves as the catalyst for Eric’s own descent into psychosis is among the best written passages to ever grace horror literature. The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath – one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.

More rejection slips from a smaller number of publishers, as fewer had SF lists within which to bring my deathless prose to an unsuspecting but, I was certain, ultimately extravagantly appreciative and indeed rightly thankful public. It was a strange feeling; like something from another life had stepped into this one and made me its prisoner. Join him and Iain Banks for a discussion on Thursday July 10 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Frank lives in a world of private rituals, some of which involve torturing animals, and has committed several murders.

If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. Banks' major achievement is to make the reader feel sorry for this character of Frank and as one audience member acknowledges, to make us laugh. Throughout The Wasp Factory, members of the central Cauldhame family attempt to exert control over each other and over the wider world. This refers to the ship Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, first mentioned in Look to Windward. By the time that Banks was duly named as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 1993 (aged then 39) he was an established name with a strong and often youthful following.

Complicity, Banks once explained, is a bit like The Wasp Factory, “only without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness”.The strong make their own pattern ms and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. He would later teach creative writing at the university, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1997. Frank relates to the reader how he killed three of his relatives in the same manner used for talking about the weather or what you bought from the supermarket.