A Clockwork Orange

Historically important and cleverly executed.

The first thing most people remember about this book is Burgess' invented lingo, Nadsat. It's difficult to get into, but it becomes natural pretty quickly - it's almost surprising how effortless it becomes.

The main character is a nasty piece of work - he's the leader of a local gang who quite enjoy vandalism, brutal assault, rape, and the occasional murder (although it's a delicacy seldom enjoyed, as it harbors greater consequences for the young droogs). Part of the background of the novel is that the terrible behavior of these boys is supposed to be the fault of the friendly neighborhood dystopian society, but I don't entirely buy that for personal and political reasons of my own. They're show more assholes. Let's work with that.

Through a short series of events, our dashing protagonist is arrested and undergoes a form of "aversion therapy," wherein his favorite acts of violence are associated with extreme feelings of pain, guilt, and sickness, and these feelings just happen to also be brought on by his favorite Beethoven. It works pretty well, for a while - unethical as it may be, it gets results.

Everything is fine for a little while, until a man he and his good brothers had wronged finds out exactly who he is, and decides to get revenge by playing Beethoven's 9th over - and over - and over again. The narrator jumps out of a window to escape the agony, and that's the end, right?

Wrong. He wakes up in the hospital and finds - joy of joys! - his aversion therapy has been reversed. He almost immediately returns to his life of crime; "they cured me, alright!" Well, so much for reformation.

In the final chapter (which was curiously left out in the original American version and thus out of Kubrick's film), the narrator has grown quite bored of violence. He meets up with an old droog who's settled down, married, got a job, white picket fence - the whole nine. Maybe that's what's been missing all along. So he decides to do the same, remarking that his own kids will probably be just as awful as he was.

This ending leaves a sour taste in my mouth, although it makes sense. While we could say it's a lingering effect of the therapy, in reality it seems more reasonable to say that he just burned himself out.

Have you ever gone into a fit of anger or rage and hit someone, or blackmailed them, or otherwise engaged in some sort of destructive behavior? Sadly, most of us have at some point - and as soon as it passes, we feel guilty and wish to return to being productive members of society. And we do. And sometimes it happens again. For the characters in the novel, it simply seems that this was more concentrated - a period of years rather than hours.

And that's why it makes more sense - people can change. Even rapists, murderers, the scum of the earth. And THAT is what leaves a sour taste in my mouth; maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the book at all. show less

Like a dose of smelling salts, A Clockwork Orange arrives with force and leaves you feeling queasy, but also leaves you alert. Author Anthony Burgess' dystopian world of teenage gangs roaming about committing random, nihilistic acts of violence sounds disturbingly prescient when viewed from 2025, when news headlines regularly inform us of some new depth plumbed by elements of our society, whether that be school shooters, machete brawls or child-rape gangs. Burgess' world is made even more disturbing by the government's response to these "droogs": comprehensive brainwashing during incarceration which leaves the perpetrators confused, hollowed-out shells who are in turn abused by the weak, vindictive society after they are defanged.

This show more is where the book's enigmatic title comes from; something that ought to grow naturally but which has been hollowed-out and made into a pointless automaton. For such a short book, A Clockwork Orange gets its point across remarkably well. It's hard to pinpoint a specific theme; Burgess doesn't overtly moralize and when he does, in the final chapter, it falls flat – I find myself agreeing with the book's original American publisher when they cut the final chapter from their edition, making the ending darker. But the author's world convinces; his invented slang for the teenage delinquents (the book is written in this vernacular) is surprisingly easy to grasp, and helps pull us into the story rather than push us away. A Clockwork Orange convinces in its nihilistic, dystopian fetish for violence, the government's totalitarian reaction to it, and a weak society's passive acquiescence to it. The latter is not often acknowledged, but often the most important and damaging of the three. The most disturbing thing, for me, is that from the perspective of 2025 the acts of depravity committed by Burgess' characters now seem almost tame compared to the real world. show less

4.5/5

An excellent, short dystopian novel with a unique style and subsequent challenges. A Clockwork Orange follows a delinquent teen, Alex, and initially his three friends on their nighttime drug-induced tours of violence. The book is written from Alex's point of view and in English, but leans heavily on 'nadsat' slang, something that Burgess created out of Russian. This nadsat is what most teenagers use in A Clockwork Orange when addressing each other, a language that confuses the 'starry' (old) class of people. Much as it did for me, for awhile.

A lot of the meaning behind these words can be gleaned from the context clues that Burgess gives you, but it's still a steep learning curve at first. The usage of nadsat continues throughout show more the book, and rarely are actual definitions ever given. I think your enjoyment of A Clockwork Orange is largely dependent on your opinion of this slang language, and the graphic violence that Alex is fond of. Personally I found the nadsat to give the novel a fresh feeling despite it's age. Usually in these older SF novels, the author will include the slang of the period they are writing in, which at the time of publication might make the author seem less like an old fogy, but reading it 50 years later it typically makes the writing pointedly dated. Nadsat gives the world of A Clockwork Orange a unique and real feeling, something that I doubt will dissipate quickly.

The writing itself is typically long-winded in a semi-stream of consciousness style. I had mixed feelings about this, but I loved the structure of the plot itself and the repeated motifs within. I can see merits to both of the two 'ending' chapters (the copy I read included the final chapter that was omitted from the Kubrick film and many editions of the novel), though I think chapter six is a stronger finish to the novel, a resolution that also seems in line with the rest of the work.

A Clockwork Orange revolves mostly around the concept of free-will and choice. What does it mean to make someone 'good', especially if they have no choice to be 'bad'? Can there be rehabilitation through control? These are questions that Burgess doesn't answer directly, but leaves at the reader's feet for examination through Alex himself. There's also commentary on the prison system, government overreach, and police brutality to name a few. Burgess has things to say and doesn't pull any of his punches, which I respect.

It's a classic for a reason. I can see a lot of people disliking, or even hating it for its obsession with graphic violence or the writing style. Still, its a rare book that will illicit strong feelings to either end of the spectrum, and I find these types of works be the most interesting. It speaks to their memorability, their unique qualities that make them stand out of the crowd. A Clockwork Orange is memorable to the extreme, and I'm certain that the memory of reading it will have me back to the well at some point in the future. Interested in see the Kubrick film as well and see how it compares. show less

La prima parte è faticosa: Alex racconta la sua storia in prima persona con il suo linguaggio inventato in cui occorre entrare. Poi, se uno ha visto il film di Kubrick, non può non pensare a come lui riesca a rendere alla perfezione questa parte, e a orientarsi sulla posizione "oh, sta a vedere che a questo giro è meglio il film?"
Poi Alex viene preso e comincia la parte della prigione, del Metodo Ludovico (seconda parte) e infine il ritorno alla società (terza parte). E qui, la situazione cambia. Infatti Burgess riesce ad andare a fondo in maniera precisa, in cui ogni dettaglio non è lasciato al caso, in cui i rimandi ad altri punti del romanzo sono precisi e importanti.
Sulle interpretazioni di questo romanzo, credo siano stati show more scritti fiumi di parole, e anche sull'ultimo capitolo che non fa parte dell'Arancia Meccanica di Kubrick (e che, tra l'altro, è stato aggiunto in seguito: Kubrick in prima battuta non lo aveva letto): quello che mi ha colpito, e che credo che mi rimarr, è l'estrema modernità che ho colto.
Burgess lo pubblica nel '62. "La bontà è qualcosa che si sceglie. Quando un uomo non può scegliere cessa d'essere un uomo", dice il cappellano del carcere, quanto ci facciamo anche oggi privare per apparente quieto vivere della nostra libertà di scelta? E ancora, "Ammucchiate dei criminali insieme ed ecco quello che succede. Ottenete della criminalità concentrata, il delitto dentro il gastigo. Presto potremmo aver bisogno di tutto lo spazio delle nostre prigioni per i delinquenti politici", dice il governatore, tirando fuori una quantità di riflessioni sul sistema carcerario e sui totalitarismi che non abbiamo ancora superato. Per non parlare di come Alex viene poi tirato per la giacchetta per essere utilizzato a scopo meramente propagandistico.

Per tirare le fila, 200 e spiccioli pagine dense, non scorrevoli, necessarie. Da (ri)accoppiare con la visione del capolavoro di Kubrick e con tanto Beethoven (e un po' di Mozart). show less

Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange paints a horrifying, grim, dystopian future. Your Humble Narrator - or, Alex - and his three droogs spend their evenings and nights beating, raping, torturing and stealing from any person unlucky enough to be in Alex's path. One evening, however, the gang turns on Alex and he is set-up, with the police arriving just as he murdered an old woman in her house.

Off to jail he goes, having to serve over a decade in a prison over-stuffed, with six or more people sharing a cell designed for two or three prisoners at most. Alex, however, is given the choice to take part in a new program that will get him out of the prison in two weeks, and back to the outside world to live his life as he sees fit. show more This new program, however, is not something Alex expected; Alex was tied to a chair, with his eyes taped open and forced to watch horrible acts of violence and murder - acts all-too familiar and enjoyable to Alex - as an injected chemical makes him feel nauseous and sick. After two weeks of this treatment, Alex would feel sick at the mere thought of violent acts.

The treatment worked, and Alex's life became a living nightmare, as his former friends were now police officers and old victims were able to exact their vengeance upon Alex. A failed attempt at suicide left Alex in the hospital - cured of Ludovic's experiment - and a return to the life of violence and crime he once knew.

So ends the previously published American version, short one chapter that had been published in the UK. Burgess claims the American publisher made the decision to leave out the final chapter while the publisher claims it was "merely a suggestion made for conceptual reasons." Regardless, the American version misses a chapter that is vital to the message: the power of choice.

One of the characters - the prison chaplain - asks the questions, "Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?" Through the experimental punishment to rid Alex of his evil ways, he no longer had a choice in his actions. This brings a moral dilemma, discussed by a panel after Alex has completed his punishment. "He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice," argued one person, but the general consensus was that, "We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime...and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons." This moral dilemma, the ability to choose right or wrong, good or evil, is the message of Burgess' work. The final chapter completes the story and how Alex chooses and acknowledges this moral choice.

A Clockwork Orange is written in a peculiar way - the entire book uses the nadsat language created by Burgess. Not so much a language, rather heavy slang influenced by Slavic languages, the use of nadsat creates a unique world the reader becomes entranced in. It also helps to alleviate the gruesome nature of Alex and his friends, putting more focus on the message rather than the brutal acts of violence. While some may be put off by the confusing language at first, Burgess does an excellent job introducing it and using each new word in context easy to understand and grasp, and before long the reader will be reading at his/her normal pace. show less

I know Burgess doesn't like the idea of writing anything that appears to "moralize," but this novel definitely suffers from the addition of the 21st chapter. The themes that the author seems to be building--on the nature of man, on freedom, on morality--all seem to be reduced to "Oh, those are merely the problems of youth, and will disappear with age" in the final resolution. Very postmodern, very disappointing.

I always advise my friends to read the first 20 chapters, stop and draw conclusions/react, and then read the final chapter to see how one's opinions are changed.

How to review an infamous book about which so much has already been said? By avoiding reading others’ thoughts until I’ve written mine.

There are horrors in this book, but there is beauty too, and so much to think about. The ends of the book justify the means of its execution, even if the same is not true of what happens in the story.

Book vs Film, and Omission of Final Chapter

I saw the film first, and read the book shortly afterwards. Usually a bad idea, but in this case, being familiar with the plot and the Nadsat slang made it easier to relax (if that's an appropriate word, given some of the horrors to come) into the book. The film is less hypnotic and far more shocking than the book, because it is more visual and because, like the show more US version of the book, it omits the more optimistic final chapter.

The British censors originally passed the film - uncut. But a year later, it was cited as possibly inspiring a couple of murders, leading to threats against Kubrick's family. The year after that, Kubrick asked for it to be withdrawn, and it was, even though he said
"To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around."

See Withdrawl of film from UK screens
and
Omission of final chapter

Plot and Structure

It is a short novel, comprising three sections of seven chapters, told by “your humble narrator”, Alex. In the first section, Alex and his teenage gang indulge in “ultra-violence” (including sexual assault of young girls); in the middle section, Alex is in prison and then undergoes a horrific new treatment (a sort of aversion therapy); the final section follows him back in the real world, rejected by his parents, now the puppet of opposing political factions. The whole thing is set in a slightly dystopian, very near future and explores issues of original sin, punishment and revenge, free will, and the nature of evil.

One awful incident involves breaking in to a writer’s house and gang raping his wife, who later dies. A similar incident happened to Burgess’ first wife (though he wasn’t there at the time). Writing a fictionalised account from the point of view of the perpetrator is extraordinary: charitable, cathartic, or a more complex mixture?

Themes

Why is Alex as he is?
“What I do I do because I like to do”, and perhaps there is no more that can be said. As Alex ponders, “this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into the cause of GOODNESS… badness is of the self… and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty”.

Can people like Alex be cured, and if so, how?
Imprisonment, police brutality, fire and brimstone don’t work. Enter the Ludovico Technique, whereby Alex is injected with emetics before being strapped, with his eyelids held open, to watch videos of extreme physical and sexual violence. He becomes conditioned to be unable to commit such acts, or even to watch or think about them. This raises more questions than it solves. The prison governor prefers the old “eye for an eye”, but has to give in to the new idea of making bad people good. “The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within… Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” The chaplain has doubts, too, “Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?” On the other hand, by consenting to the treatment, Alex is, in an indirect way, choosing to be good.

The technique (or torture) is promoted as making Alex “sane” and “healthy” so that he can be “a free man”, but although he is released from prison, he remains imprisoned by the power of the technique, even to the extent that the music he loves now makes him sick (because it was playing in the background) and his inability to defend himself means he becomes a victim.

Do the ends justify the means?
Dr Brodsky thinks so: “We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are only concerned with cutting down crime.” However, if it wears off, it will all have been for nothing.

Redemption?
The possibility of redemption is a common thread, reaching its peak in this final chapter. Burgess was raised as a Catholic, educated in Catholic schools, but lost his faith aged sixteen. He continued to have profound interest in religious ideas, though, as explained here.

The final chapter (omitted from US editions of the book until 1986, and also the film) feels incongruously optimistic in some ways, but by suggesting the true answer as to what will cure delinquency is… maturity, it might be thought the most pessimistic chapter. Is teen violence an inevitable cycle: something people grow into, and then out of when they start to see their place in the bigger picture? And if so, is that acceptable to society?

Language - Nadsat Slang

A distinctive feature of the book is the Nadsat slang that Alex and his droogs use (“nadsat” is the Russian suffix for “teen” – see here). Burgess invented it from Russian with a bit of Cockney rhyming slang and Malay, because real teen slang is so ephemeral, the book would quickly seem dated otherwise. He wanted the book published without a glossary, and it is written so carefully, that the meaning is usually clear, and becomes progressively so, as you become accustomed to it: “a bottle of beer frothing its gulliver off and a horrorshow rookerful of like plum cake” and “There’s only one veshch I require… having my malenky bit of fun with real droogs”. Where an English word is used literally and metaphorically, the Nadsat one is too; for example, “viddy” is used to see with one’s eyes and to understand someone’s point.

The skill of carefully used context makes Russian-based Nadsat much easier to follow than the dialect of Riddley Walker (see my review HERE), even though the latter is based on mishearings of English. (To be fair, the whole of Riddley Walker is written in dialect, whereas in Clockwork Orange, it's conventional English with a generous smattering of slang.)

Where the meaning isn't immediately obvious or is merely vague, you go with the flow until it seeps into your consciousness (much as would happen if you were dropped into an environment where you had no language in common with anyone else). It's another way of sucking the reader into Alex's world and his gang.

Nadsat lends a mesmerising and poetic aspect to the text that is in sharp contrast to the revulsion invoked by some of the things Alex does: tolchocking a starry veck doesn’t sound nearly as bad as beating an old man into a pulp - Nadsat acts as a protective veil. In the film, this effect is somewhat diluted because you SEE these acts.

The book was like published in 1962 and Alex frequently uses “like” as an interjection as I did earlier in this sentence – something that has become quite a common feature of youth speak in recent times. What happened in between, I wonder?

Other than that, much of what Alex says has echoes of Shakespeare and the King James Bible: “Come, gloopy bastard thou art. Think thou not on them” and “If fear thou hast in thy heart, o brother, pray banish it forthwith” and “Fear not. He canst taketh care of himself, verily”. There is always the painful contrast of beautiful language describing unpleasant and horrific things.

Similarly, the repetition of a few phrases is almost liturgical. Alex addresses his readers as “oh my brothers”, which is unsettling: if I’m one of his brothers, am I in some way complicit, or at least condoning, what he does? Another recurring phrase is, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” It is the opening phrase of each section and used several times in the first chapter of each section.

Music

Burgess was a composer, as well as a writer, and Alex has a passion for classical music, especially “Ludwig van”. This may be partly a ploy to make the book more ageless than if he loved, for example, Buddy Holly, but more importantly, it’s another way of creating dissonance: a deep appreciation of great art is not “supposed” to coexist with mindless delinquency.

Alex has lots of small speakers around his room, so “I was like netted and meshed in the orchestra”, and the music is his deepest joy: “Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling… sloshing the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.” The treatment destroys this pleasure- with dramatic results.

Horror and Beauty, Sympathy for a Villain

Ultimately, I think Alex is sympathetic villain: he has a seductive exuberance and charm and although he does horrific things, when awful things are done to him, sympathy flows.

Yes, there are horrors in this book, but there is beauty too, and so much to think about. The ends of the book justify the means of its execution, even if the same is not true of what happens in the story. Brilliant.

Jabberwock in Nadsat

Thanks to Forrest for finding this brilliant hybrid:
https://medium.com/@johnlewislo…/the-rasoodocky-ea0a0b5290db show less