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The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

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What height is this table?' he said suddenly, just as I was about to go to the bread bin for a slice to wipe my plate with. I turned round and looked at him, wondering why he was bothering with such an easy question. this is some hard stuff, and by "hard" i mean Hard Like the Marquis de Sade Is Hard. do not read this if you cannot stomach depictions of animal torture. do not read this if you cannot stomach the murder of children. this one was hard for me to read at times, and i read some pretty terrible things.

In the end I went for something that kept me closer to my by-then comfort zone: a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenager with severe violence issues allowed me to treat my story as something resembling SF. The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. I gave in to the write-what-you-know school but with a dose of skiffy hyperbole, mining my own past for exaggerateable experiences. I'd built dams; Frank would too, though with a slightly psychotic uber-motif involving women, water, the sea and revenge. I'd constructed big home-made kites; so would Frank, and use one as a murder weapon. Along with a pal, I'd indulged in the then not-uncommon and perfectly innocent teenage boy pursuit of making bombs, flame-throwers, guns, giant catapults and more bombs; Frank would too, though alone and with a more determinedly harm-minded intensity. Includes three short works set in the Culture universe. It also includes works of fiction more characteristic of Banks's writing published as Iain Banks. A radio version of the title story was transmitted by Radio 4 in 2009. [86] Often I've thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city. It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the differing political moods that countries go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to have more to do with mood, caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I can feel the same sort of thing going on in my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.”

Frank seems to know that we need explanations for his odder comments. Lamenting the fact that he is "chubby", and not "dark and menacing" as he would like to look, he remarks regretfully: "Looking at me, you'd never guess I'd killed three people. It isn't fair." When he first mentions his half-brother Eric, he adds, without further explanation, "to whom such an unpleasant thing happened". These puzzles will be explained. But we must also decipher what he takes for granted. Piecing together the story of his mother's brief return, when he was three years old, from details dropped by his father, he says: "I can't remember anything about it at all, just as I can't remember anything before the age of three. But then, of course, I have my own good reasons for that.""Of course": as if the narrator were speaking to someone who knows just what he means. What are the reasons?

My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made.” I was never registered. I have no birth certificate, no National Insurance number, nothing to say I'm alive or have ever existed. The Wasp Factory follows Frank Cauldhame, a teenager living with his father. Frank is not a normal child. By Frank’s own admission, he has killed three other children. Frank consoles himself that this was just a phase and has taken to divining the future with a contraption he has named “the wasp factory.” Frank also explores the possibility of telepathy utilizing the skull of a long deceased canine companion and warding off threats to his person utilizing “sacrifice poles.” Lord of the Flies meets American Psycho on the Moray Firth. Frank, a teenage lad with no official record of his existence, lives with his father in an isolated dune land cottage. He spends his time killing birds and other small animals. Occasionally he kills people. His principle hobby is bomb-making, at which he excels. Frank’s half-brother Eric is on the run from a psych-ward. While on the lam he kills and eats dogs. Even Frank considers Eric nuts. But blood is blood, even if it’s diluted and most of it has been spilled. Their father, Angus, lives in a lost world of sixties hippiedom with a basement full of decaying, and therefore dangerous, Army surplus cordite. The biker-mother, Agnes, hasn’t been seen for years.

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what if Holden Caulfield was born on a remote Scottish Island into a disfunctional family, with a former anarchist for a father and a flower-power mother who ran away soon after he was born? Banks envisioned his angsty teenager character as a sort of alien living on a deserted planet, a translation of one of his science-fiction ideas. The object of the study is sanity and ethics when the individual is removed from the ordinary social interactions most of us take for granted. In 2013, the Australian producer and composer Ben Frost directed an opera adaptation of the Iain Banks novel, in which all characters are represented by three female singers. [7] Release details [ edit ] Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June.

Simone Caroti: The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction, McFarland, April 2015, ISBN 978-0-7864-9447-7 It was followed by Walking on Glass (1985), composed of three separate narratives whose connections are deliberately made obscure until near the end of the novel. One of these seems to be a science fiction narrative and points the way to Banks's strong interest in this genre. Equally, multiple narration would continue to feature in his work. a b "Interview: Changing society, imagining the future". Socialistreview.org.uk. Archived from the original on 14 October 2011 . Retrieved 9 April 2013. Two Careers. Iain Banks published over a dozen novels under the name Iain “M.” Banks, to distinguish his science fiction from his realistic fiction. He had originally planned to publish all his novels under the name Iain M. Banks, but his publisher initially encouraged him to drop the middle initial because they worried it would confuse readers. a b Simon Johnson (2008). "When is Iain Banks next appearing on TV/Radio?". Iain Banks FAQ. Google, Inc. Archived from the original on 5 May 2013 . Retrieved 6 April 2013.

Stonemouth (2012). London: Little, Brown Book Group. ISBN 978-1-4087-0250-5. Adapted for BBC TV for broadcast in 2015 (directed by Charles Martin.) [82] From its bravura opening onwards, THE CROW ROAD is justly regarded as an outstanding contemporary novel. Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1982. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge. Frank is a narcissist, but he’s honest about it: “At least I admit that it’s all to boost my ego, restore my pride and give me pleasure, not to save the country or uphold justice or honour the dead.” He is also superstitious in the manner of an athlete or a soldier who believes certain ritual behaviors are necessary for success, even survival. He is exceptionally self-aware of his physical and mental states. An initially undisclosed handicap inhibits friendships, except with others equivalently deformed. In America, with the right weapons, Frank would certainly have wiped out half his high school class.

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