The Book Tower

After 23 years I’ve finally finished The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. The debut novel by Banks was first published in 1984 and I remember reading a glowing review in Punch magazine at the time (our school kindly provided copies of Punch, Melody Maker and several newspapers in the sixth form library).

My copy of The Wasp Factory features part of the original Punch review in its cover blurb:

The Wasp Factory is a first novel not only of tremendous promise, but also of achievement, a minor masterpiece perhaps.

I never normally quote reviews printed on paperback covers and don’t always read them, but The Wasp Factory is unusual in that it features extracts from both good and bad reviews. Reading the novel, I kept returning to the heated debate raging on the inside cover as I couldn’t decide whether I liked or hated the book. Stick with Punch maybe, or side with The Times:

Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish.

So why has it taken me 23 years? I have a problem with Banks – my Punch review promised so much and when I eventually picked up the book I was disappointed. I abandoned it until now. I’ve also given up on a couple of his other novels and don’t know where to begin with his science fiction. Finally finishing The Wasp Factory, and being swayed both one way and the other by the blurb debate, I had to make my decision. Do I go with The Financial Times:

A Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality….This is an outstandingly good read.

Or sidle up to the Sunday Telegraph reviewer:

No masterpiece and one of the most disagreeable pieces of reading that has come my way in quite a while, but scoring high for pace, narrative control and sheer nasty inventiveness. Iain Banks must be given credit for a polished debut. Enjoy it I did not.

I have had to grimly conclude that I hated this book. I can’t be kind to it like the Sunday Telegraph scribe; the only passages showing any degree of talent are indeed the so-called nasty passages. There are two horrible sequences in the book where Banks shows some narrative flair, but rather than horror for horror’s sake – like passages in a good Clive Barker novel – they were sick for sick’s sake. I found no literary cleverness in this novel, no good prose or interesting characters. The twist at the end is no twist, there are no interesting surprises.

How I wish I could get back the nightmarish few days I spend reading The Wasp Factory. But maybe that’s the whole point. Let me know what you think and we can put our own blurb together.