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John Mullan on Iain Banks's debunking of the 'noble savage' in The Wasp Factory Saturday July 5, 2008 The Guardian Of course Iain Banks wanted to give us some horror. The infamous maggots scene in The Wasp Factory - explaining just why the narrator's brother, Eric, goes "mad" - is prepared with all the machinery of a melodramatic revelation. (The horror for first-time readers is that they will see it coming.) You can sense a little authorial relish. No wonder the paperback edition quoted the reviewers who hated the book: "The lurid literary equivalent of a video nasty", and so on. The novel so scandalised some, and so tickled the fancy of those who relish the breaking of taboos, that its cleverness, and its literariness, hardly got noticed. Why does Frank, the novel's 16-year-old narrator, live on an island? Why has his... [read full story]
