A younger reader confessed that she had been upset by the novel’s most shocking episode, where Frank tells us how his brother Eric found a child whose brain was being consumed by maggots. The former is cheerful, the latter grumpy, which Banks felt was the wrong way round, sci-fi readers being a notably affable constituency. Another reader recalled the literary joke in the film Hot Fuzz, in which Bill Bailey plays two policeman twins, one who reads Iain Banks, the other who reads Iain M Banks. “Banksians”, of course, do not all read the same books. His later novel Complicity, which was supposed to shock, caused no such ripples: the first novel had created antibodies to defeat the shock of the later one. The Wasp Factory was not supposed to be shocking, yet was found so. It was supposed to be funny.īanks offered readers his “anti-body” theory of critical response. The author laid no claim to Saki allusions, but was pleased to have his book thought of as a “black comedy”. She even managed to detect Banks in an inadvertent quotation of a shard of dialogue from this Edwardian master of the domestic grotesque.

She compared it - with rather convincing chapter and verse - to the cruelly amusing fiction of Saki.

One - who declared “I’ve been a Banksian for the last quarter of a century” (“Banksian” was a noun with which the novelist himself was unfamiliar) - argued that, far from being horrifying, it was “very, very funny”.

Several of the readers who came to hear the author discuss his novel at the Guardian Book Club last week mocked this response. How shocking is The Wasp Factory? The current paperback edition carries extracts from some original reviews that described it as (in the words of the Sunday Express) “the literary equivalent of a video nasty”.

The wasp factory