47 pages • 1 hour read
Iain BanksThe Wasp Factory
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Bomb Circle”
Frank thinks of himself as a state or a city and compares his moods to the political changes that municipalities experience. He compares his conflicting thoughts to the way people vote for change: They may act against their self-interest just to feel differently: “I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain” (62).
Sometimes he feels guilty about the murders and for the attack on the rabbits, although his guilt is not about the loss of life. He killed the rabbits because of the rogue male. He also knows that he is racist, although he knows few people of color on the isle and understands that his racial distaste is irrational. Frank knows there was no need to take revenge on the rabbits, and that the death penalty serves primarily to make the avengers feel good, not to punish the guilty.
Frank anoints his new catapult with various bodily fluids, then finalizes the naming ceremony by firing a pellet at a wasp, and then at his own foot, which leaves a bruise. He scoffs at the ritual while also acknowledging that it works and makes him feel good. Finally, he writes the name of the catapult on the back of a polaroid of Paul, wraps it around a pellet, and shoots it into the sea. He thinks the catapult will be safe as long as no one knows its name.
At the Bomb Circle, he reflects that everything—from the Bomb Circle to his father’s leg—is his mother’s fault: Agnes. He can’t remember her, but thinks: “If I did I’d hate her” (66). She let them take Eric away and blamed their father for putting Eric in girls’ clothes. She only came back once, causing Frank’s “little incident” (66): Frank killed her other son, five-year-old Paul, in the Bomb Circle.
Frank and Paul had found a large, old torpedo half-buried on the beach. Frank told Paul it was a bell. He wanted Paul to ring it while he watched from a hill nearby. The torpedo exploded and left a crater behind when Paul hit it with a stick. In the following days, Frank pretended to grieve and let Eric console him. Diggs had questioned him, and Frank had to pretend to be a visiting cousin, since there was no record of his existence. The tide took away any evidence before Diggs could investigate the scene.
At home, a woman named Mrs. Clamp is at the house, filling their cupboards. She eats with Frank and his father, a Saturday tradition. She mentions that she heard the constable was there, but they say no more on the subject. Frank goes to the Cauldhame Arms pub that evening. His friend Jamie, a man with dwarfism, watches the live music from Frank’s shoulders as they talk about Eric’s escape.
Later, Jamie talks about motorcycles with a girl, which disgusts Frank. He hates women even more while drinking. Frank gets lightheaded and dizzy, and they go outside. Soon, the two of them have to hold Frank up. Frank is rarely this drunk. He tries to make an eloquent speech about class relations, but they think he is just clearing his throat. Frank runs away from them and vomits nearby. The sound reminds him of the noises Eric makes on the phone when he’s angry. The girl leaves.
Jamie’s mother makes them tea at her house. Frank leaves at one in the morning and walks along the marshes, where he remembers seeing lights in the sky two years earlier: the shimmer of gas flares from oil rigs. He understood how people came to believe in UFOs. When he gets home, he thinks the silhouette of the house looks like a skull in the dark.
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Bunch of Flowers”
Frank thinks he killed his cousin Esmerelda to balance the fact that he had already killed two males. Esmerelda’s parents were Harmsworth and Morag Stove. They were his half-uncle and half-aunt and had watched Eric from age three to five. Frank compares the urge to kill Esmerelda to the urge to scuff one shoe against a curb, after it happens to the other, restoring equilibrium. He had been making kites and often took Esmerelda to fly them. One day a cord from a kite twisted around her neck, which gave him an idea. He built a larger, heavier kite that she wouldn’t be able to untwist from and painted a dog on it. The next time they flew kites together, the cords around her wrists lift her into the air and carried her out to sea.
Frank knows that his proximity to three deaths in four years would cast suspicion on him for Esmerelda’s death, so he planned his reaction. Someone stayed with him at night, where he always awoke abruptly with fake screams. He recalls, “It took me a week to recover, and it was one of the best weeks of my life” (94). After he explained what happened, he said he thought he was cursed: anyone near him would be hurt. He asked his father to burn the kites out of guilt.
On Sunday, Eric calls while Frank is in bed, recovering from his hangover. To keep his father from getting suspicious, Frank pretends he is talking to Jamie as Eric orders him to admit he is “burning up with love” (100) for him. Frank thinks he hears a dog in the background, followed by a howling scream. Eric says the dog got away and hangs up. The phone rings again and Frank hears crashing noises until the phone goes dead. Back in bed, Frank thinks about the fateful day with Saul, whom he calls the “Castraitor” (103). He worries about Eric and then decides it is time to consult the Wasp Factory.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Skull Grounds”
Agnes returned to Angus when she was almost nine months pregnant. She had left Angus shortly after Frank was born, only to reappear three years later, when Frank was three and Eric was staying with the Stoves. She deflected Angus’s questions about her abandoning him and lived there for two weeks. Frank has often been told that, prior to the accident, he loved playing with Saul, the old bulldog. This doesn’t surprise Frank because he knows that Saul didn’t like women.
Mrs. Clamp helped with Paul’s delivery. They heard Frank scream during the birth and came outside to find blood between his legs. Frank’s father immediately chased and strangled Saul, who had savagely attacked Frank’s groin. Paul was born at the same time that Saul was attacking Frank. Agnes stayed and recovered for two more days. Angus tried to stop her, but she ran over his leg with her car and broke it. This is when Mrs. Clamp began caring for Frank’s father, who set his own broken leg, resulting in his lifelong limp. She took the newborn Paul to the hospital and Saul was buried in what became the Skull Grounds.
In some way, Frank thinks Paul was actually Saul, which is why Frank had eventually killed him. The animals he killed later had to die in order for Frank to get to Old Saul’s Skull. He shot small gerbils, flinging them across the water with the catapult before having their funerals on the other side. It took 37 tries before his spade found Saul’s skull while digging a grave for a gerbil. Frank calls that the Year of the Skull, when he finally captured his enemy with his power.
He had cleaned the skull in the Bunker and surrounded it with magic, thinking: “My enemy is twice dead and I still have him. I am not a full man, and nothing can ever alter that; but I am me, and I regard that as compensation enough. This burning dogs stuff is just nonsense” (109).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Frank reveals that he killed Paul, his brother, and Esmerelda. Thematically, in terms of irrational revenge, Paul’s death is likened—in Frank’s perception—to Saul’s attack, and Esmerelda’s murder advances the motif of women as a pollutant on the island. Despite the fact that he admits he killed Esmerelda on a whim, Frank also discusses her death as a necessity, given that he had already killed two males:
I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly (87).
These contradictions are not completely lost on Frank, who thinks, “Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn’t really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain” (62), which foreshadows his conversation with Jamie about whether his family is as mentally unstable as everyone believes. Esmerelda’s death leads him into a spell of performative grief, which is the only type of grief Frank can feel. His fake grief includes a remark that he believes he is cursed. Even though it is inauthentic, his remark builds upon the theme of predestination. Frank does bring pain and destruction to those who spend the most time with him, but he sees this simply as him acting as a man should.
When Frank describes the nature of children, he characterizes them as a separate species from adults:
Children aren’t real people, in the sense that they are not small males and females but a separate species which will (probably) grow into one or the other in due time. Younger children in particular, before the insidious and evil influence of society and their parents have properly got to them, are sexlessly open and hence perfectly likable (63).
This observation helps explain why Frank kills so easily, even while admitting that he has killed people who are perfectly likable. If children are not real people, then there is no reason for Frank to feel the guilt that he would associate with killing real people. Importantly, the “realness” of a person is associated with specific sexual maturity, which is further linked to a person’s “unlikability.” Sexual maturation, and for Frank this means explicit gender differentiation, is a detestable element of adulthood. This logic contextualizes Frank’s belief that he will never become an adult due to his genital mutilation.
Frank’s reflection on this most significant event firmly puts him on his course for irrational revenge and reinforces the theme of predestination, particularly as one’s gender is said to determine the course of one’s life. Because Frank believes that adult manhood has been stolen from him, he reacts by acting as masculine as he can—killing—and taking control over those entities he has any power over in his child-like body—animals and other children. For example, when he uses the Skull on the altar, he gloats: “My enemy is twice dead, and I still have him” (109). The most power he is able to exact on adults is with language and sarcasm. For example, when reflecting on his mother’s abandonment, he says, “She left one dead, one born and two crippled for life, one way or the other. Not a bad score for a fortnight in the summer of groovy and psychedelic love, peace, and general niceness” (107).
Frank’s insistence on violence is colored by his thoughts on vengeance itself, and whom it ultimately serves:
I think reprisals against people only distantly or circumstantially connected with those who have done others wrong are to make the people doing the avenging feel good. Like the death penalty, you want it because it makes you feel better, not because it’s a deterrent or any nonsense like that (63).
Frank’s attitude toward revenge speaks to the theme of The Nature of Evil and the Origin of Psychopathy in that he acknowledges a pleasure in the pain of others. While his violent behavior can be attributed to his childhood, his perspective here suggests that there might be something innately human about enjoying the pain of others. In framing his attitude this way, he is able to pursue revenge for selfish reasons all while telling himself that he is simply satisfying an appetite or compulsion that all humans have.
