The Wasp Factory
Frank’s family is very strange. His father lives off what is left of the family wealth and is an eccentric ex-hippy. He and Frank seem to have an OK enough relationship, even though Frank knows his father has been spending most of his life telling lies which seem to be for just the heck of it. Frank’s mother abandons him, adding to his hatred of women, which turns ironic as we discover the end of the story. Frank also has a brother, Eric, who escapes from a sanitarium. Eric had been put away for setting dogs on fire and scaring the local children by stuffing worms and maggots into his mouth.
Note: If you have not yet read this book, SPOILERS appear below.
At the end of the book, we find out that Frank is actually female. His father uses an attack by a dog, in which Frank supposedly loses his testicles and most of his penis, as an experiment. Born a girl, Frank’s father pumps her full of steroids and goes as far to create a fake set of male genitalia out of wax. His father obviously has his own issues, but why did he do this?
There are so many strange aspects worth examining in this book. I would first like to discuss Frank’s claim that he has murdered three people. Frank is not a reliable narrator; he has an overly active imagination and a grandiose idea of himself. He claims to have taken his first victim at the age of six. He supposedly killed his cousin with an Adler snake as revenge for the previous year when his cousin killed their bunnies with Eric’s homemade blow torch. Also, Frank claims to have encouraged his younger brother Paul to blow himself up with a bomb found on the beach and to have made an enormous kite allowing his cousin Esmeralda to fly away and never be seen again.
Has Frank really done these things? We do know he has a taste for killing animals, which psychologists often say is a sign of a future serial killer. Could the cause have been the male hormones? Or perhaps Eric does all the killing while Frank tries to take credit for it, and maybe this is the real reason why Eric was sent away. Could the deaths all have been just freakish accidents that occurred when Frank was around? What do you think?
