Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
caindevera @ 5:02 am
July 15, 2008
http://anatomylesson.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/%EF%BB%BFiain-banks-the-wasp-factory/I hate to spoil the endings of books, but in this case knowing the ending of
The Wasp Factory is absolutely necessary to an understanding of the book's themes.
Spoilers abound ahead: you have been warned.
In the surprise conclusion, the reader learns that the protagonist Frank
Cauldhame, an aggressive, obsessed, disturbed and 'slightly' murderous (only three
so far, he swears!) teenager who believes himself to be castrated, is actually a girl; her
father had lied about an accident in Frank's (or Frances') very early childhood in
order to raise her as a boy. Though often described as a new kind of gothic horror
novel, The Wasp Factory is also a particularly effective, and particularly gruesome,
satire on the social and scientific construction of gender; Frank is a woman, who
believes herself to be man, who hates women, and acts out a male identity centred on
the soldier-hero, over-the-top violence and aggressive adventurism, in a style that
reminds me strongly of a cross between Dennis the Menace and Vlad Tepes. The
Wasp Factory also fits in nicely with Banks' other works, as his science fiction novels
set in the Culture universe frequently reject the narrow and rigid classification of
gender according to biological sex; it appears to be an abiding fascination, at the very
least.
