Classic book, set an example for many to come!!!

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	• A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess W. W. Norton & Company, 1986 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 619 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of the Great Dystopia-Futuristic Novels

Burgess vision of the future is one of totalitarian control and violence at the point of chaos. The authorities have given up the night to the youth gangs that then menace citizens in both the street and in their houses. What is scariest of these thoughts is that the perpetrators of this violence are kids under the age of eighteen. Our protagonist, Alex, is fifteen and his droogs (friends) are not much older. They rob, rape, drink, take drugs.

Once you get past the language (try not to spend too much time looking at the glossary), there is a powerful message about good and evil. Alex is arrested for murder and then commits a second in prison. A new treatment based on drugs and aversion therapy has been developed to control the 'bad' impulses, and Alex is chosen as the first prisoner to be treated. As is to be expected, the treatment does more than just stop Alex from being 'bad' it takes away his ability to protect himself (in more ways than one).

This is the full version of the book. The original american version was missing Part 3 Chapter 7. For anyone who has read the pre-1986 version or seen the Kubrick-McDowell movie, the missing chapter will come as a revelation. In his intro to the novel, Burgess himself discusses the meaning of the last chapter and what was his motivation. Read it and make your own conclusions...which is what Burgess was going for in the first place.

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Classic book, set an example for many to come!!!

This book was way ahead of it's time. A story of Alex and his gang who was set forth on a mission of ultraviolence. The book painted a picture of what could happen to kids in a world where violence is toned down to the point where it becomes "daily activity". It also gives descent insight into the mind of an Antisocial. Using a conglomeration of Russian, German, and made up words, Burgess even created a slang talk that enhances the uniquness of this story. Very cool book, one must pick it up, quick and easy read.

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Bedazzled

I admit, although I've known about this book for a long time I shied away from reading it because all mentions of it I had heard were blood, guts, and gore and nothing more but when I finally gave in and read it I was more then pleasantly surprised. Yes, this book is violent and gory but oddly enough that's only one of many distinguishing characteristics.

The story itself weaves around page after page of strange and often catchy made up slang with a character that all at once can be hated and pitied. The smattering of scintillating imaginary slang that dance around the story doesn't take away from the often ironic and thought provoking plot. I hadn't really expected this book to make me sit back and think about morality in such a way. What IS good? And for that matter what is evil? Does a lack of evil (by force) automatically constitute good? You'll see the question by all sides and I must say the last chapter that was not published in the original American printings I think adds that final layer to the story it needed. Without it I think I would have been left feeling antsy about the entire book. In any event I do suggest this book even to those who normally shy away from 'ultraviolence.'

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Dystopian visions coming true!

Anthony Burgess has envisioned an ugly potential future that came to be. In addition to such writers as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, British authors seem to be the masters of creating fiction which predicts the worst possible societal, political, and cultural decay, based on contemporary observations of the latest trends in these three factors. In Clockwork Orange, Mr. Burgess portrays what was for him, a near-future Britain, in which economic failure, inept and corrupt government, and social malaise result in a society overwhelmed by crime. The main perpetrators are vast numbers of street-gangs roaming the cities, savagely assaulting, robbing, murdering, raping, and vandalizing...for fun. The gangs are largely composed of teenagers, who aside from their random violence, are also obsessed with drug-abuse and pop-culture, a pop-culture with its own trendy slang-language (based on Russian in this case). This scenario, exists now, in certain neighborhoods of specific cities! The vision did come true!
The main character and narrator, is Alex, an average street-thug, who describes graphically the psychopathic crimes commited by his gang. Despite his vile behavior, one can't help but find a certain charisma in Alex. His one positive attribute seems to be his love of classical music, Beethoven specifically.
Alex eventually finds himself in prison, and volunteers for an experimental "treatment" in exchange for early release. This turns out to be a form of operant-conditioning, which programs him to be violently ill whenever he feels compelled to violence. The government endorses this new method, so as to make space for "political prisoners", by releasing "treated" street criminals. The result: Alex is released into a crime-ridden society, completely unable to defend himself! This becomes the major philosophical point of the story. The most disturbing fact is that some bureaucrats really do believe such concepts are an acceptable means of "establishing control".
Get the unabridged version of this book WITH ALL 21 CHAPTERS. Some time ago, the American version was very foolishly published with only 20 chapters! I didn't get to read the last chapter until 1995!
The film version, is a Stanley Kubrik classic, but is based on the abridged version of the story. The film was banned in Britain for quite some time because film-goers were emulating the behavior in the movie!

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An Oxymoron : Moral Choice by the Numbers

Picture Nighthawks, the painting by Edward Hopper. Dim the lights. Cobble and dirty the streets. Roughen the clientele, and ascribe raucous thuggery. Such is the ambience of A Clockwork Orange. Exit into the crisp night air with caution; this is not a place for the faint of heart. This is the rough and desolate world of post-modern existentialism.

His name is Alex, and he leads a gang of thugs. Dressed in the height of fashion, their minds are filled with drugged drink, solipsism, and "ultra-violence". Sometimes they are the Nighthawks; sometimes they are those they prey upon them. They are, at minimum, a terror that menaces this hollow society.

Anthony Burgess brings together the graphic violence of Quentin Tarantino, the inky ambience of Joseph Conrad, and (bear with me here), the understated and even farcical humor of Damon Runyon. Unlike Tarantino, however, Burgess has thinly veiled the disturbingly violent escapades of Alex and his cohorts under a narrative written in a fictional slang. The slang itself is part of what creates an otherworldly ambience, seasons the text with whimsical humor, and brings the reader into an unsettling relationship with the graphic imposition of suffering which Alex and his gang have embraced as their daily bread-and-butter:

~~So that was old Dim's cue and he went grinning and going er er and a a a for this veck's dithering rot, crack crack, first left fistie then right, so that our dear old droog the red - red vino on tap and the same in all places, like it's put out by the same big firm - started to pour and spot the nice clean carpet and the bits of his book that I was still ripping away at, razrez razrez.~~

"What's it going to be then, eh?" is a question which, by my count, appears three times in the text. The question implies that Alex is indeed capable of choice, of becoming more than a victim himself of a habitual cycle of violence. Once at the beginning of the book, once in prison, and once at the end of the book among a new troop of gang member, the question surfaces, as if inviting Alex to value something more than the temporal. It is not until the element of choice is taken from Alex that he begins to change, at first assuming a passing interest in God while in prison, and then after being subjected to a government-imposed scheme to rid prisoners of violence through chemically- and visually-induced brainwashing.

Although I struggle with valuing any book so intently focused on violence, I find A Clockwork Orange a quirky piece of brilliance. The humor is subtle but well-placed in revealing Alex's adolescent qualities. Once incarcerated, he wisecracks about being "dressed in the height of prison fashion" and extols the value of reading the Bible, but mainly the part where the Jews beat each other up, drink plenty of wine, and sleep with each other's wives . . .

Yet despite his penchant for violence, it is hard to not humanize Alex. His smirking, if not comedic outlook on life is somewhat contagious, and he is not immune to the full range of human emotion. Once faced with the prospect of a government reform program which would eliminate his power of choice forever, he seems to encounter real fear, a nascent conceptualization of sin, and the prospect, according to the prison chaplain of being "beyond the reach of the power of prayer". Having come through the program and endured various measures of victimization and reform afterwards, however, he still carries a comforting resemblance to his original, whimsical self. Recovering in a hospital, he asks about his condition in his typical, humorous fashion, "But has anyone been doing anything with my gulliver? What I mean is, have they been playing around with inside like my brain?"

It is unlikely that many readers would naturally identify with Alex. But this is perhaps part of Burgess' brilliance. Despite Alex's immersion in the dregs of life (drugs, crime, violence, gangs, etc.), we begin to value his humanity as manifested in the freedom to make moral choices. Once stripped of this, we begin to see Alex as stripped of an inalienable right, as stripped of his own humanity. Perhaps then, the enduring value of A Clockwork Orange is its affirmation of moral choice as an inextricable component of humanity in us all. To be deprived of choice is to be deprived of being human, even if we remain physically alive.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, page 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

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