Still, he offers the reader justifications for his actions, and the book acts as a kind of explanation, if not apology, for a lifetime of aberrant behavior. He believes that a system of Poles (animal skulls mounted on sticks), his Bunker (a room full of animal skulls and candles where he holds soothsaying rituals), and the Wasp Factory (a maze-like clock that tells the future based on how the wasps who navigate its surface die) can help him tell the future. Much of Frank’s behavior is clearly insane. It is up to the reader to interpret his actions as normal or abnormal, because Frank always frames himself as logical and rational. As a result, the novel calls into question the definition and spectrum of madness, asking what behavior truly qualifies as insane, and who has the right to apply that definition to another person.įrank, the narrator, makes himself out to be entirely sane.

The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien.” The book was written in the “write-what-you-know school but with a dose of…hyperbole,” by which he meant that violence and horror were exaggerated, but born out of the more recognizable violence and experimentation of childhood. In a 2008 reflection on his novel in the Guardian, author Ian Banks notes that he began writing the book as “something resembling. He provides context for his and Eric’s actions, and can point to the root causes for many of their strangest behaviors, causing the reader to wonder about the boundaries of sanity versus insanity, and who is truly sane or insane. Their behavior is objectively abnormal, when not actively criminal, but Frank’s unreliable though unemotional and rational narration depicts his behavior especially as sane and reasonable. Frank has murdered three children, frequently tortures animals, and believes he can tell the future through interactions with wasps, while Eric likes to set dogs on fire, and was once institutionalized for trying to feed maggots to local children. Brothers Frank and Eric Cauldhame both exhibit behaviors far beyond the bounds of acceptable human conduct.

The wasp factory book