The wasp factory

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The Wasp Factory (original title The Wasp Factory ) is the first published novel by the Scottish writer Iain Banks . The English original edition was published in 1984, the German translation by Irene Bonhorst in 1991.

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The novel is written from the perspective of the seventeen year old Frank Cauldhame, who describes his childhood. Frank follows numerous shamanistic rituals he invented . It is soon revealed that he is responsible for three deaths in his family - other children who all died before they could reach the age of ten. As the novel progresses, his brother escapes from a psychiatric institution . The brother's imminent return leads to a violent ending and a twist that undermines everything Frank believed he knew about himself by then.

The wasp factory that gives it its name is an enormous dial in a glass box that Frank salvaged from the local rubbish dump. Behind each of the twelve numbers there is a trap that leads to a different death ritual for a wasp locked in the glass case by Frank (for example, burning, crushing or drowning in Frank's urine). Frank believes the wasp's "chosen" way of death will help him predict the future.

Frank also erected sacrifice poles , on which the bodies and heads of larger animals that were killed by Frank, such as seagulls, hang alongside other "sacred objects" . They "protect" the borders of Frank's territory - the island where he lives with his father.

Frank engages in his rituals and maintaining a collection of weapons (including a catapult , pipe bombs, and a primitive flamethrower ) to rule the island. He suffers from the effects of an accident in which he lost his genitals and is hostile towards others, especially women. He walks or runs around the island a lot to guard it and occasionally gets drunk with his dwarf friend Jamie at the local pub . Apart from that, Frank has next to no contact with the outside world and admits that he is afraid of her because of what she did to his brother Eric.

Frank's older brother, Eric, was arrested for torturing the small town's dogs and was admitted to a mental hospital. At the beginning of the novel, he escapes and then calls Frank over and over again from phone booths to inform him of the progress of his return to the island. Your phone calls always end in Eric's outbursts of anger. Frank isn't sure if he should look forward to Eric's return, but it is clear that he loves his brother. Frank remembers that his brother was very sensitive before "the incident" that drove him insane. Eric did volunteer work in a hospital. When trying to feed a smiling child with brain damage who had a rare hereditary disease (lack of skullcap ), Eric found that the patient was unresponsive and only smiled blankly. He examined the child's head bandages and found that maggots had lodged in his exposed brain mass .

At the end of the novel, Eric's imminent return sets off a chain of events that lead Frank to find doses of male hormones in his father's office . When he confronts the father, it becomes clear that Frank is actually female. He was not neutered by dog ​​bites in early childhood , as he believed, but his father gave him - or her - male hormones to see if it would make her a man. The father states that it was just "an experiment" and it is implied that he was trying to differentiate himself from the woman he believed ruined his life.

reception

The novel was written in 1980 but was not published until 1984. The German translation was published by Heyne in 1991 in the Science Fiction & Fantasy series (volume 4783). The Wasp Factory became a bestseller translated into over 20 languages ​​and made Iain Banks famous in one fell swoop. When it came out, the book was often described as shocking and repugnant in English-language reviews. The Irish Times called the novel a "work of unprecedented depravity". Banks' intention was not to shock with The Wasp Factory - he thought the book should be "funny". According to Dietmar Dath , the novel can be classified as "a British variant of Latin American ' magical realism '".

After its translation into German, the book was awarded the Kurd-Laßwitz Prize in 1992 as the best international science fiction novel of the previous year. Despite this award and its German first publication in a science fiction series, it is, unlike other works by Iain Banks, a contemporary novel and not a science fiction or fantasy work. Iain Banks himself described the inclusion of the work in an SF series in an interview as "silly and stupid". The then editor of the SF series at Heyne Verlag, Wolfgang Jeschke , took the title into his series because no other publisher wanted to publish it (not even with financial support for the translation).

In a survey of 25,000 British readers for the best book of the 20th century, carried out jointly by the bookstore chain Waterstone’s and the literary program Book Choice ( Channel 4 ), The Wasp Factory came in 32nd. In 2003 the BBC carried out a similar survey the most popular novel in the UK by ( BBC Big Read ), in this it came in at number 108. In the meantime, the novel has also been adapted several times for the theater.

On August 1, 2013, the Bregenz Festival premiered a setting of The Wasp Factory for three singers, five strings and live electronics by Ben Frost based on a libretto by David Pountney in a co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and the Royal Opera House London .

expenditure

First edition:

German first edition:

  • The Wasp Factory (=  Heyne Science Fiction & Fantasy . Band 4783 ). Heyne, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-453-04492-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Horst Illmer: Ian Banks: Welten  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 5.8 MB). In: Literature Circle Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy . Issue 299, July 15, 2010, ISSN 1613-7124@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.literaturkurse.eu   
  2. ↑ John Mullan: Shock tactics ( en ) In: The Guardian . July 19, 2008. Retrieved July 16, 2012: "This" work of unparalleled depravity ", as the Irish Times once called it (...)"
  3. ↑ John Mullan: Shock tactics ( en ) In: The Guardian . July 19, 2008. Retrieved July 16, 2012: “The author (…) was pleased to have his book thought of as a“ black comedy ”. It was supposed to be funny. "
  4. ↑ Dietmar Dath: On the death of the writer Iain Banks - The name of the future: culture . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 11, 2013. Retrieved October 19, 2014.
  5. ↑ Kurd Laßwitz Prize 1992 ( Memento of the original from October 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on epilog.de (accessed October 20, 2010)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.epilog.de
  6. ^ Henry Feltham: The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks . Critic ( University of Otago student magazine ) May 18, 2010
  7. ^ Matthias Hofmann: From the wasp factory to the Krähenstrasse. A conversation with Iain M. Banks . In: The Science Fiction Year . tape 7 , 1992, ISBN 3-453-05379-6 , pp. 610–631 , here p. 614 .
  8. ↑ See the editorial in Das Science Fiction Jahr 1992 , especially p. 12 f. Jeschke literally: "I assumed ... that I would expect a regular SF reader to read a non-SF novel by a well-known author rather than a reader of general entertainment literature to expect an SF novel."
  9. ^ Marianne MacDonald: No Sartre, no Lessing, no Mailer: Frodo the hobbit beats them all . In: The Independent , July 20, 1997
  10. ^ The Big Read . BBC; Retrieved October 21, 2010
  11. ^ Cult classic The Wasp Factory re-imagined . The Inverness Courier, May 27, 2008
  12. ↑ Guy Cassiers on kulturserver.de (accessed October 20, 2010)