Last year a friend of mine, having heard I’d never read The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, immediately brought it off his shelf and into my temporary possession.

As an aside - I do love it when friends actively give me books to read. There’s something both warm or intimate and something definitively smug about the action - Like saying yes my taste is good and I heretofore declare it publicly by thrusting this physical thing of culture and good taste upon you. May you align yourself to my cultural enjoyments.

It’s a strange book and if you’ve ever read Banks, it certainly steps away from his more fantastical sci-fi (apparently having been written because he had trouble publishing said sci-fi). It grinds over the ongoings of a psychopathic boy living somewhere remote in Scotland while he builds and destroys fake dams and villages (like a psychopath), pretends to be civil to his dad and an old lady who brings groceries (mostly like a normal person) and remembers with fondness his murder of a few children (most definitely like a psychopath).

If you haven’t read this (and I mostly recommend you do, if only because it’s extremely short and quite interesting to explore the internal monologue style Banks thought would make sense for this character) then the rest of this post will be spoilers. For the most part this book explores the ongoings of this boy, Frank. We listen to how he despises people and women (because women deserve their own category in terms of despising possible), we observe his shamanistic rituals including wasps and their ludicrously complex murder, we note how he spends his day in seemingly aimless pursuits. He’s not registered with his local council, he doesn’t go to school and lucky child that he is, he just happens to come into all the right scenarios to facilitate some murders.

The sticking point with this book is for me, not in any part except the very ending. Why does Frank so simply accept that he/she/they are a woman within the span of a day? Why do they suddenly have some self-revelatory moment of epiphany that all their murdering is because of some “revenge” for a lost penis? It all seems a mite farcical and quick to conclude.

The lie and manipulation by the father of the child; wanting to rid themselves of females; deciding to transform their girl into a boy; planting feints and fakes through stories and drugs - heinous though it is, these are all believable plotlines. On the other hand, the question of what can drive a child to murder (even a psycopathic one).. What plotline makes sense for this? Somehow, the answer doesn’t seem to lie within the inherent importance Banks seems to place in gender.

Perhaps I’m part of the flag-waving gender nonconformists of the new age - but children only care as much about gender as their parents imprint into them by their beliefs. While maybe the father is a grouch with serious inability to be in a relationship (surprise surprise), it hardly elevates the importance of the penis within the book. Certainly not enough that Frank would murder both male and female children, even before puberty and all those awakenings of insecurity vs desire that come with it. But I have missed something in this mystery book ending?