The Wasp Factory

As promised, I finished The Wasp Factory today, that too in one sitting. A book like this is meant to be finished this way, I feel, for all its bits and pieces - obscured and hazy at first - start making sense gradually, and its a wonderful feeling to have your faith in an author rewarded with a denouement that is not only satisfactory, but also sheds new light on what 'mainstream' fiction is capable of, once seen from the perspective of science/speculative fiction.

The Wasp Factory is not science fiction, but a reader acclimatized to the genre will find the going smoother. For one, the book begins by immersing the reader in the mind of our protagonist - 16 year old Francis - who is clearly not 'normal' in the way we usually understand the word. Francis speaks of The Factory, and Sacrifice Poles, and chances are that a reader who has no experience with neologisms - something that SF revels in - will find it difficult to, as it were, trust the author with such sudden introductions to concepts without any context to back them.

The protagonist has led a particularly violent childhood, in more ways than one. To see through the eyes of such a person is, of course, nothing new in Literature. And yet, the book does not pose an interpretive challenge in the vein of Burgess's Clockwork Orange, but it does share another similar difficulty with that book - that of, on the one hand, being made privy to (what might seem) gratuitous acts of cruelty and torture and of being able to stomach them, and, on the other, asking that oft-fatal question: why should I care?

And therein lies the beauty of this novel. The protagonist is as candid, and in a way, somewhat demure regarding his actions, so as to remind one of Holden Caulfield. Indeed, he shares the first part of his surname with the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. In the telling of his crimes, he is never repentant (till, perhaps, the final chapter), and thoroughly rational, and even sensitive in his dealings with his only friend, the dwarf Jamie. It is this attitude that Banks gets at very effectively, and might even allow for something approaching 'empathy' from the reader.

The Wasp Factory is ultimately science fictional in the same way that Kafka's The Trial might be deemed science fictional, or even, Camus's The Stranger. While this latter example might be hard for some readers to take seriously, in the context of SF, I'd argue its not very far fetched an analogy at all. Science Fiction, or at least the SF that matters, is often more an attitude, and less a stereotypical genre. And in its attitude, The Wasp Factory is perhaps as rewarding as any work of fiction that is explicitly speculative.