However, I was so freaked out by a few of the scenes that I needed to take a break from the twisted world Banks has created in Frank’s head. It is absorbing and well paced, and I think I could have finished it the night I started reading just because it seemed impossible to extract my own train of thought from the antihero Frank’s own narration. So, thinking about him and unable to sleep, I finally picked up The Wasp Factory to see if it was as distressing as everyone had told me it was. The universe is worse without him, but was improved by his 59 years of existence. In fact, he was witty as hell even when he was writing about his own mortality. I had the amazing luck to go out with Iain and his lovely girlfriend (now widow) Adele upon both occasions, and he was such an interesting and funny man. I had only read The Crow Road before I first met him, and a bit of Stonemouth after, but I’ve been wanting to read The Wasp Factory and Consider Phlebas ever since he did two talks with the St Andrews Literary Society in the past couple of years. I’m still reeling from the news of Iain Banks’s death, it’s a tragedy for the literary world and for the Earth in general. It took me two nights to read The Wasp Factory, not because it was particularly long – it’s actually quite a short novel – but because it’s one extremely tense and disturbing little story.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |