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”.
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