Like the most iconic island in 20th Century British fiction, the one in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, this one can be seen as a microcosm.

Is he serious? Is Frank? Is Iain Banks? Who knows? He’s a trained doctor, but writes papers on the shape of the earth – a Mobius strip, if you were wondering – and what can be learnt about people’s mental and emotional states from their farts. Frank can do what he wants, and his father is as lost in his own world as Frank is. You would expect that an adult, 45 years old as near as Frank can gauge it, would offer some guidance. Should we believe any of it? Frank doesn’t call his own reliability into question, obviously, but he does tell us how his own father – the one who shares the island’s only house with him – often made things up as he educated him at home. That idea sums up two more of the memorable things about this novel: the ink-black humour and his unreliability as a narrator. He wants it to be clear that he doesn’t intend to kill anybody else, because he was just going through a stage. His violence towards insects and small mammals is routine, and he tells us about the three murders he committed when he was younger.

And I remember him as the archetype of the ‘wanton boys’ that Gloucester compares the gods to in King Lear, the ones who kill us for their sport. I remember the totems and rituals he takes as seriously as though he is chief of a tribe of more than one. I remember the voice of Frank from the first time I read this years ago, master of his claustrophobic little world on the bleak island not quite fully detached from the Scottish coast.

Iain m banks the wasp factory