The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

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Additionally, Frank believes he was castrated as a child, and feels himself to be unlike many of the local boys. There are places, too, where I was trying to use Frank to express something about the stated and real reasons for brutality (hence Frank's musings on the attack on the rabbit warren). Banks was involved in the stage production The Curse of Iain Banks, written by Maxton Walker [33] and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1999.

Since then he has gained enormous popular and critical acclaim with further works of fiction and, as Iain M. Perhaps I would ask for one of those LED alarm radios, though I’m very fond of my old brass alarm clock. The dates of publication of The Quarry were brought forward at Banks's request, [51] to 20 June 2013 in the UK [52] and 25 June 2013 in the US [19] [53] and Canada. 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. The narrator is the 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland.According to Banks, this allowed him to treat the story as something resembling science fiction – the island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. Empire Games, the seventh book in The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross published in 2017, is dedicated "For Iain M.

For the rest of his career literary novels would alternate with works of science fiction, the latter appearing under the name "Iain M Banks" (the "M" standing for Menzies). I stood looking at it in the darkness, just aware of its bulk in the feeble light of a broken moon, and I thought it looked even bigger than it really was, like a stone-giant’s head, a huge moonlit skull full of shapes and memories, staring out to sea and attached to a vast, powerful body buried in the rock and sand beneath, ready to shrug itself free and disinter itself on some unknowable command or cue. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks.Many of his novels contain elements of autobiography, [79] and feature various locations in his native Scotland. This shocking novel is an insight into the life of sixteen year old Frank, a brutal and disturbed teenager who enjoys killing animal and insects all too much. It was striking how many of those who responded to the news spoke of having encountered him in person, often after a reading or public interview. 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.

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties.He clearly relished this closeness, regarding the round of literary festivals and speaking engagements, often a chore for contemporary authors, with undisguised pleasure. Is there good reason for Frank to be so blithely unhinged, so devoted to his warfare against wildlife and his ritual killings?

A first novel not only of tremendous promise, but also of achievement, a minor masterpiece, perhaps. 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. Illustration: Guardian Design ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’: the first line of Banks’ The Crow Road (1992).It also engineers the reader’s complicity in the events of the novel, perhaps, which works well for a story about a series of gruesome vigilante murders. Although he saw the novel as an exaggeration and satirization of the more run-of-the-mill violence of childhood, he too spent his early years making bombs, flamethrowers, and giant catapults. When he first mentions his half-brother Eric, he adds, without further explanation, "to whom such an unpleasant thing happened". Death and blood and gore fill the pages, lightened only by the dark humour, the surreal touches, and the poetry of the thing.