Iain Banks' Wasp Factory is 40. How did that happen?

But The Wasp Factory being 40 is a particularly hard one to take. It was a shock of a novel when it came out. It still is shocking today. But back then that cruel, strange voice seemed a new one in Scottish fiction at the time. The fact that I was at Stirling University when I read it and I knew Banks was a Stirling graduate only made me inclined to like it even more.

Banks’s time at Stirling didn’t get a mention during Inside the Wasp Factory on Tuesday afternoon. Never mind. Presented by Simon Pegg and featuring contributions from Banks’s fellow writers Val McDermid and Irvine Welsh, as well as sundry academics, this sturdy documentary was a love letter to the book and to its creator.

Not that everyone loved The Wasp Factory. Infamously the Irish Times called it a novel “of unparalleled depravity”. Kirsty Wark, in the last recorded interview with Banks before the author’s death from cancer in 2013, suggested to him that it was a literary “hand grenade”.

Iain Banks' debut novel was called a novel “of unparalleled depravity” by the Irish Times (Image: Newsquest Media Group)

Banks himself thought he was writing a pro-feminist, anti-militarist novel. He was surprised that it was received as an upmarket horror novel.

The book was, as the programme pointed out, certainly very Gothic. It contains a controlling father, a house that holds a secret and a protagonist - Frank, a feral “mad boy” - who has a split identity.

If anything, the novel may resonate more now than it did then. As Banks’s fellow author and great friend Ken McLeod pointed out, the intense misogyny of Frank in the novel may make him the first incel.

As presenter Pegg brought a bit of stardust but not a lot else to the table. I’d liked to have heard more about his own teenage experience of reading the book and its impact on him.

Still, this was a loving, and surprisingly moving reminder of the author and his work. As Irvine Welsh noted at one point, you just wish Banks was still here to try and make sense of the world in 2024.

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It’s been a bit of a Scottish week on Radio 4. Scheduled straight after Inside the Wasp Factory on Tuesday afternoon Greg Jenner’s history programme You’re Dead to Me looked at the life of Robert the Bruce in the company of academic Dr Iain MacInnes and comedian (and recent Herald Magazine interviewee) Marjolein Robertson.

The “the” in Robert the Bruce is a bit of an anachronism, according to Dr MacInnes and, as the show went on, to Robertson’s horror, the idea of Bruce as a Scottish hero increasingly took a wee bit of a battering. After all, he sided with the English, fought against his fellow Scots, married a child, and killed his rival John Comyn in a church.

This is all before his victory at Bannockburn which meant his wife Elizabeth - an English prisoner at the time - was returned to Scotland. “Maybe by now she’s of legal age,” Robertson hoped.

Finally, on Monday on Radio 4 Alexei Sayle took the train from Waverley to Aberdeen in the latest episode of his series Strangers on a Train in which he talked to the people he met on the journey and told us the deep-fried Mars Bar was “invented” in Stonehaven.

It also allowed him to remind us that “getting off at Haymarket” is sometimes a euphemism for coitus interruptus.

These days I mostly think of Haymarket as the handiest station to get to Fopp. How our priorities change as we get older.

Waverley Station (Image: PA)

Listen Out For:

Front Row, Radio 4, Tuesday, August 13, 7.15pm

The Fringe is halfway through and here’s the aforementioned Kirsty Wark coming live from Edinburgh for Radio 4. Her guests this evening include comedians Nish Kumar and Rose Matafeo. Music comes from Teenage Fanclub