A Clockwork Orange

Although I’ll be adding many caveats to this opinion of “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess, I would recommend a reading of this book.  Especially the version he wrote that wasn’t fully published in the United States for a number of years.  Being a young author and in need of money he agreed to let the American editors publish the book without the last chapter and that is the version that Stanley Kubrick based his film on.  I saw the film some years ago and it was quite disturbing.  The book is also pretty disturbing.  However, if you are among (as Burgess puts it quite amusingly in his introduction to the full book) the .00000001 of the American population who cares about such things, you would want to read the full story as the author wrote it and intended it to be read. 

Now for the caveats: 

First, it is written from the point of view of our narrator, Alex, and he speaks in a made up version of cockney slang which can put offputting at first, but you can quickly catch on to what the words mean.   Here is an example (and good for a larf too!):  “Then he clenched his stinking red rooker (hand) and let me have it right in the belly, which was unfair, and all the other millicents (police officers)  smecked (laughed)  their gullivers (heads) off at that…”  And sorry, should I apologize for laughing at that? Because up to this point, Alex has done the most horrendous and wickedest of things you can imagine without one thought as to whether it was “fair” or not.

Second, the first part of the book (written as so many of these books we’ve read – in three parts—there must be a manual somewhere “if you want to write a ‘great’ book be sure to write in three parts…”) is filled with some pretty horrible stuff that made me feel sick and dirty just listening to it (I had it in book form and on cd and switched back and forth between the two versions as I was travelling).

I found the book to be basically about the audacity of youth in the fullest definition of the word.  Bold or daring; fearless; unrestrained by any sense of shame or propriety; brazen, insolent – all these words describe our young narrator Alex.  I especially didn’t like the feeling I got when he referred to me as “friend” or “oh my brother” as it tended to make me feel I was some sort of willing co-conspirator in his misdeeds.  He and his droogs (friends) have the most pathological hatred for the elderly, which is to say the adult, but you may be surprised to find out our narrator’s age at the end of the first part.  This prejudice against the older population is alive and well today and this talk about and these acts toward this population upset me because as a society we tend to be dismissive and disgusted by “old people” and I don’t ever want to be lumped into a category with Alex and company.

If you can hang in there with all that, there is a story to be told and a point to be made.  The title “A Clockwork Orange” refers to a book that is written by one of the characters and is about the nature of goodness and evil and is at the crux of what Burgess is getting at with his novel.  “’The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness…laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation’” is what the fictional author is writing about.  When Alex finally goes to jail for his numerous crimes the prison chaplain also weighs in on this theme.  Alex is offered the chance to participate in an experiment that will cut his sentence and free him.  The experiment is designed to make him a “good” citizen.  The chaplain tries to talk him out of this idea.  “’It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321.  It may be horrible to be good…What does God want?  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?  Deep and hard questions...”  Deep and hard questions indeed! 

"Enjoy" would not be the word I would use to describe the reading experience, but I would recommend you give it a go if you are interested in thinking about such moral and ethical questions as this book delves into.