The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory is a 1984 novel by Iain Banks. It is equal parts family drama and horror story, focusing on the teenage narrator, Frank (Frances) Cauldhame. It explores topics of mental health, gender and sexism, revenge, and free will. The Wasp Factory is a controversial novel, given its graphic depictions of violence against animals, and the affectless manner with which Frank describes his crimes against family members and animals.

Content Warning: The novel contains graphic cruelty toward animals, exploitative depictions of mental illness, and forced gender reassignment.

Note on Pronoun Usage: Frank, the novel’s protagonist, learns that he was assigned female at birth. This guide uses masculine pronouns throughout to align with the character’s predominant gender identity throughout the novel, but does use feminine pronouns at points when the character identifies as Frances.

Plot Summary

Frank and his father, Angus, live on a small Scottish island. Frank sees himself as the guardian of the island. As the story begins, he is checking a grotesque security system he calls the Sacrifice Poles: a series of poles posted on the shoreline, each containing the head of an animal Frank has killed. After he anoints the Poles with various bodily fluids, he believes he can see through their eyes as if they were surveillance cameras.

Frank often consults an oracle he calls The Wasp Factory for answers to complicated questions. Frank builds the Wasp Factory from the face of a massive old clock. He places wasps beneath the glass of the clock face where they are then presented with twelve corridors they can choose, each leading to a different, gruesome death. Frank interprets the manner of deaths chosen by each wasp as an omen. At the beginning of the story, he is particularly interested in his brother Eric, who has recently escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Throughout the novel, Frank refers to an unpleasant event that changed Eric forever. The event in question occurred when Eric was working at a hospital as a medical resident. He was feeding a baby boy whose skull had not developed, requiring the staff to fit his head with a metal helmet. After believing he sees a movement in the baby’s forehead, Eric removes the helmet, only to find that a fly has laid eggs in the baby’s brain, which is now filled with maggots.

Eric quickly deteriorates, develops a drinking problem, leaves medical school, and is committed to a series of increasingly harsh psychiatric hospitals. This occurs after he is caught burning the dogs on the island and forcing young children to eat worms and maggots. Eric calls Frank throughout the novel, warning him that he is on the way. Each time, Frank begs him not to hurt more dogs.

Frank’s father is an eccentric academic who obsessively catalogues the lengths and widths of household items, often subjecting Frank to dinnertime quizzes about the dimensions of the table, for instance. He has a study in the home whose door is always locked. Each time Angus leaves, Frank tries to enter the study.

Throughout the remainder of the story, Frank vacillates between killing various animals for his shamanistic rituals, passive aggressively arguing with his father, and taking phone calls from Eric. During his internal monologues, he reveals that he had killed three people by the time he was nine years old: his brother Paul, a cousin named Blyth, and a cousin named Esmerelda. He also reveals that he was attacked and castrated by a dog named Saul at age three.

At the novel’s climax, Frank manages to enter the study and finds a vial of male hormones, along with a box of tampons. He suspects that his father is a woman. However, when Frank confronts him, his father explains that Frank was assigned female at birth, and his birth name was Frances. He was not castrated, but his father used the mutilation as an opportunity for an experiment: he wanted to live in a home without any female influences, so he raised Frank as a boy, blocked his menstrual cycle with drugs, and tampered with his hormones so that he would grow a beard.

At the end of the novel, Eric returns and he sleeps on the shore with his head on Frank’s lap. Frank does not know what to do with his future. He believes that he always killed out of a need for revenge and because he was trying to do the most masculine thing he could think of to compensate for his castration. Now he wonders if the killings were in vain, and appears to be hopeful about his future.