Author of the wasp factory7/8/2023 In an abandoned bunker he has made an altar whose centrepiece is "Old Saul", the skull of his father's vicious bulldog, put down for biting off Frank's genitals when he was a toddler. He has invented private rituals, imitating religion. We begin to realise that he has constructed a violent mythology, in which animals become sacrificial victims, and that his bloody imaginings are the consequence of his own strange history. I already knew something was going to happen the Factory told me." We must follow Frank's account of how he fills his long, solitary summer days to work out what this means. The very title of the novel is a puzzle, confirmed by the opening paragraph: "I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. The reader has a different need for explanation. In the way of a fairy-tale or a gothic yarn, we know that we will enter this mysterious chamber before the novel ends. At intervals in the narrative he tries the door, hoping that one day his father will forget to lock it. He has a study, which is always locked Frank has never seen inside it. He lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. The narrator of Iain Banks's novel, 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, is looking to explain a mystery.
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