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| This month features The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. |
It is one of the great opening sentences: 'I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped.'
And one question about The Wasp Factory is whether the novel ever quite matches up to such immediately and intensely created strangeness. I would say yes, it does.
Like The Wicker Man, The Wasp Factory contains its own fully developed mythology; also like The Wicker Man, there is a slight sense that this mythology is a stronger creation than anything else (character, plot, style) in the work.
The Wasp Factory tells the story of Frank L. Cauldhame, the youngest surviving member of perhaps the most dysfunctional family in all literature: a father (who isn't what he seems), no mother, three sons - one mad, one dead, the other... but that would be giving too much away.
Like most books about childhood, The Wasp Factory is of necessity a retelling. However, it is a retelling of an adult book that has been handed over to children: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Like Daniel Defoe's hero, Frank L. Cauldhame is shipwrecked (by the tempestuous events of his early childhood) on an island which he feels the constant anxious need to master, to colonize, to enslave. Crusoe manages to keep his sanity, his religion, his misguided calendar; Frank, by contrast, goes native. This, I think, is what most readers will take away from The Wasp Factory (apart from the extreme set-pieces) - a vivid and long-lasting impression of Frank's world, the scraggy, beachy landscape of the island, and how the elements of his mythology are constructed piece by piece from its detritus.
Another novel in this lineage, William Golding's Lord of the Flies (which I've done as a cult book before), also takes Crusoe as its start-point, but focuses not upon a solitary man but upon a gang of boys. What interests Golding is society as an expression of the individuals that constitute it; both Defoe and Banks are interested in the opposite: the individual as an expression of the society from which he seems totally estranged.
The Wasp Factory is told on two levels, by two fairly distinct voices: one, the death-fascinated boy-as-boy: his is the capitalized language of the Wasp Factory and all its adjuncts - the Sacrifice Poles, the Rabbit Grounds, the Black Destroyer, the War Bag, the Snake Park; his, also, are the evasive nouns, the excitable verbs, and the overall bathos of cruelty; the other voice is that of what you might call the Implied Adult Organizer, a grotesque cold-hearted and hilarious raconteur spinning out histories of familiar damage and slaughterous autobiographies; his are the sentence structures, the more contemplative adjectives and adverbs, the arc of the story - in other words, the novelistic nuts and bolts.
Most of the time, these two voices speak together, in a queasy stereo: 'I cradled the gun in my arms and set off at Emergency Speed, hurtling down the path back to the island at maximum, trusting to luck and adrenalin that I wouldn't put a foot wrong and end up lying in the grass with a multiple fracture of the femur.'
The possibility that this double narration raises is that it is just imaginable that the adult rationality will somehow have interfered, before the crisis we know is coming, in the pagan doings of the boy. If the rational has developed out of the pagan, we reason - if the man has sprung from the boy - perhaps he did so by putting the brakes on, by calling a halt. Throughout the book, though, the schizophrenic voices are telling us (in stereo) not to hope against hope - not to hope at all.
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