The Wasp Factory, a book review

Sadly, Iain Banks passed away earlier this month, but his fiction lives on. I’ve read (and enjoyed) quite a few of his science fiction novels, but have never read any of his mainstream fiction books. I’d heard a lot about The Wasp Factory, and decided to give it a try. As he explains in his introduction, it was his first attempt at mainstream fiction: he’d written a few science fiction books, but couldn’t get them published. The Wasp Factory  gained him instant notoriety; he garnered critical praise, but there was also some disgusted furor.

The novel’s narrator, Frank Cauldhame, is an intriguing, but seriously warped, individual. He is an intelligent, obsessive-compulsive teenager with a personality that displays a strangely innocent morbidity; he performs truly despicable acts, yet he can be accepted as a sympathetic character. His dysfunctional family is intriguing, but not fully explored: this is Frank’s story, and the other characters are satellites who orbit about him.

I can’t say I ‘enjoyed’ the book; it is too macabre to consider it an enjoyable reading experience, but I found it interesting and well-structured. As usual, Iain Banks was able to wedge in examples of his dark humour, and I particularly enjoyed Frank’s re-telling of his uncle’s successful, yet bungled, suicide.

A warning: animal rights activists and feminists should probably be tranquilized before reading the book.

The plot is well thought-out, but I thought the twist was over-telegraphed; perhaps I knew the twist and had forgotten I knew it (i.e.: a subconscious knowledge), but once I’d caught on, it seemed rather obvious.

There were quite a few grizzly sections in the book; and, to balance things out, the next novel of his I’m planning on reading is The Crow Road, which is supposed to be a more light-hearted read (but, if I know Iain Banks, there are some grizzly events within it).

 The Wasp Factory is too twisted for a recommendation, but it was an interesting novel.

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The Use of Weapons, a book review

The Culture is a fictitious, galactic civilization; a hedonistic, socialist utopia, which is populated with intelligent, biological species, but overseen by sapient machines called Minds, which not only rule the Culture, but also control massive star-ship-colonies  that house billions of beings. The Culture books form a ‘series’ of stand-alone novels, written by Iain M. Banks (aka Iain Banks, without the M., when he isn’t writing science fiction, e.g.: The Wasp Factory). The Culture, managed by the machine Minds, sometimes needs difficult, non-Culture-related tasks taken care of, which come under the auspices of Contact. The most sordid activities are directed to Contact’s Special Circumstances  branch. The Culture utilizes psychological and political schemes to ‘persuade’ other civilizations to adopt the Culture’s philosophy as a means to assure the Culture way of life is not endangered; many times, persuasion leads to war.

I’ve read three of the Culture novels. I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, so I began with the first Culture novel published (Consider Phlebas (1987), which I didn’t like much), then I read the second Culture novel (The Player of Games (1988), which I did like), and I just finished the third Culture novel, Use of Weapons (1990), which I think is the best so far, by a country kilometer.

Use of Weapons unfolds in alternating-chapter plot-streams: one plot moves forward in time (chapters one through fourteen), and the other stream flows backward in time (from XIII to I). The forward moving chapters reveal the current activities of Diziet Sma (to be precise, Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marchehide), Special Circumstances agent,  in her latest assignment as the handler of Cheradenine Zakalwe, a non-Culture, human-norm Soldier-of-fortune/General who does the Culture’s dirty-work. Zakalwe has dark, hidden memories that haunt him, and these memories are motivation to fight for the ‘good guy’, but Zakalwe is forever questioning the tactics of the Culture (do the ends justify the means?), and I don’t think I’m giving anything away when I suggest that Zakalwe is one of the weapons being used. The chapters that flow backward in time move resolutely toward an event that Zakalwe would rather forget.

This book includes graphic violence in several sections, and Mr. Banks’ imagination has a morbid steak, but I enjoyed this book more and more as the plot moved along. The ending was well set-up and presented, and the revelation sent reverberations back through to the beginning of the novel.

If you can manage your way through the plasma-guns, spaceships, and graphic violence, the book is quite enjoyable.

Recommended