A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess, 1962 ★★★★

The Boy’s Not Right in the Head

A Clockwork Orange is something that shouldn’t exist in nature but does: bracing social comment that also works as pure pulp fiction. Should man be free to choose; or if not, does he cease being a man? Never mind that, what about all that ultra-violence!

When reading A Clockwork Orange today, two other things jump out. One is the unique lingo of the narrative, the so-called “Nadsat” slang of our juvenile-delinquent protagonist, Alex. The other is it being made into an even more famous Stanley Kubrick film.

More on that later.

In the novel, related as first-person narration, Alex lives a carefree life with his three rowdy mates, or “droogs;” stealing, raping, and getting into street fights. Just 15, he becomes too much of a bully even within his gang; after he murders a woman they set him up for arrest. To escape prison, he volunteers for a novel treatment, called “Ludovico’s Technique,” designed to reprogram him into a law-abiding citizen.

The Minister of the Interior spearheading the treatment calls it government’s solution to violent crime:

“Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all. Full implementation in a year’s time. Punishment means nothing to them, you can see that. They enjoy their so-called punishment.”

"You are being made sane, you are being made healthy," Alex is told as the Ludovico commences. An imaginative reconstruction of the Technique as staged by Liverpool Everyman Company in 2018. Photo by Marc Brenner from https://www.whatsonstage.com/liverpool-theatre/news/sets-clockwork-orange-liverpool-everyman-droogs_46533.html.

The Technique works on Alex all too well. Instead of being able to think and act on his own, he must fight the impulse to be sick whenever he gets a violent urge – even if in self-defense – or hears some of the classical music he loves which had accompanied his treatment. Even just thinking about being beaten turns him into a quivering lump of pain.

Alex becomes an unwilling exemplar of the Golden Rule: “And what, brothers, I had to escape into sleep from then was the horrible and wrong feeling that it was better to get the hit than give it.”

Author Anthony Burgess’s command of language is what grabs you most about A Clockwork Orange. It comes through most clearly in the use of his invented Nadsat argot, a gumbo of Slavic terms repurposed around Cockney rhyming slang in a manner which is rather musical. Thus the Russian word khorosho, meaning good, mutates into “horrorshow;” the phrase dirty bastards employs two Russian words to become the rhymey “grahzny bratchnies” and apologies rolls out as “appy polly loggies.”

In the novel, milk when mixed with powerful narcotics is a popular beverage for Alex and his mates. Above, an image from a 2019 stage production. Photo by Casey Campbell from https://pamplinmedia.com/fgnt/38-features/440415-353028-a-clockwork-orange-hits-the-vault-stage-this-spooky-season.

My old paperback comes with a glossary in the back, but after a while you don’t need it; Burgess’s playful alterations and the way they are presented in the narrative become intuitively understood in a way that brings you disturbingly closer to Your Humble Narrator.

It’s an enormously inventive trick that Burgess employs again and again, most perversely when Alex is in his criminal glory, just before the droogs’ trap is sprung:

Then I saw the stairs going down to the hall and I thought to myself that I would show these fickle and worthless droogs of mine that I was worth the whole three of them and more. I would do it all on my oddy knocky. I would perform the old ultra-violence on the starry ptitsa and on her pusspots if need be, then I would take fair rookerfuls of what looked like real polezny stuff and go waltzing to the front door and open up showering gold and silver on my waiting droogs.

Youth gangs were a thing in Great Britain in the early 1960s, when A Clockwork Orange debuted. Above, rival gangs of mods and rockers work things out on Brighton Beach in 1964. Image from https://hardofhearingmusic.com/2017/09/06/here-are-some-luscious-summer-numbers-to-reflect-on-what-was-a-traditionally-topsy-turvy-british-summer/.

The novel is composed of three near-equal parts. Each part begins with the same phrase (“What’s it going to be then, eh?”). Each runs seven chapters, though for decades the 21^st chapter was deleted in the U. S. market. Characters encountered in the first part of the novel return in the third part. The philosophical middle introduces Ludovico’s Technique and the question of moral choice, which brings in the novel’s title.

A Clockwork Orange is better known as that Stanley Kubrick film, starring Malcolm McDowell and nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1972. Like Stephen King, who was angered at the way Kubrick adapted The Shining, Burgess resented Kubrick’s film, though for different reasons. He thought it glamorized elements his novel sought to deplore.

Unlike King, Burgess couldn’t complain much about story alterations. Nearly everything that happens to Alex in the book happens in the movie. He’s much younger in the novel (15 at the start), but if anything Kubrick softens the character. In the novel, Alex murders a fellow prisoner and rapes a pair of ten-year-olds he tricks into visiting his parents’ apartment (“Well, if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had.”) The women he meets in the film are much older, and the sex is consensual.

The iconic opening shot of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film shows Alex and his droogs at the Korova Milkbar, "making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry." Image from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-clockwork-orange-1972.

The famous costumes of the movie – white suits with bowler hats and protective codpieces – are different in the novel, though similar:

The four of us were dressed in the heighth of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is). Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is)…

McDowell’s performance and the brutalist production design are key strengths of the film missed in the novel. But Burgess’s way with the pen and his sly wit are distinct compensations. Kubrick himself once told interviewer Michel Ciment how Orange is “one of the very few books where a writer has played with syntax and introduced new words where it worked.” Some of those words remain in use to this day.

The title is an odd phrase that Burgess claimed to have picked up in a Cockney pub, “queer as a clockwork orange.” In the novel, it is the title of a political writer’s manuscript which catches Alex’s eye as he is in the process of raping the writer’s wife. “That’s a fair gloopy title,” he muses. “Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?”

Anthony Burgess. While he never published a formal sequel to A Clockwork Orange, he adapted it to stage and in later life wrote an unpublished manuscript detailing his objections to Kubrick's film. Image from https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-Clockwork-Orange-novel.

Apparently Burgess was struck by the dichotomy of an organic item like a piece of fruit made to operate in a mechanical fashion, and saw it as comment on the dehumanizing nature of modernity. For me, it doesn’t quite work, and neither, really, does the ending, an unsatisfying deus ex machina sort of thing which abruptly reverts Alex to his nasty old self. “I was cured alright,” he says at the end, and that is that.

Except it isn’t, at least if you read the book today, or in England back then. In those editions, you got that final chapter where Alex finds himself a hoodlum again, only feeling growing ennui further triggered by an encounter with Pete, one of his old droogs who has grown up, married, and apparently reformed. It affects Alex, he admits at the end:

You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.

Michael Tarn as Pete, the quietest member of Alex's gang in A Clockwork Orange. He disappears in the movie, but in the last chapter of the novel returns to present the ambiguous possibility of redemption for our vicious protagonist. Image from http://idyllopuspress.com/idyllopus/film/co_three.htm.

The final chapter offers, albeit in an open-ended way, a sense of potential growth that feeds into its core argument of allowing for human choice. In the process, it leavens the satirical nihilism that gives the novel such volatility and was carried over into the Kubrick film.

Some argue the final chapter is the weakest part of the book, an attempt at dolling up the real message of life’s depravity with a sprinkling of traditional values, like Alex finding himself oddly moved by an image of a baby. But character development, something we generally like to see in novels, is something we would miss entirely if not for this last chapter. Not to mention the philosophical question of free will wouldn’t seem so important if Alex didn’t have the potential for redemption.

Burgess himself supposedly based his novel on the real-life rape of his first wife by American G. I.s stationed in England; perhaps that was a reason he had such difficulty with its success. Though a productive and versatile artist, he got locked into his Clockwork fame much as William Golding was with Lord Of The Flies, but minus Golding’s Nobel Prize for Literature, which Burgess openly campaigned for in later life.

A first-edition dust jacket for A Clockwork Orange. The face on the cover bears a passing resemblance to Burgess himself. Image from https://www.manhattanrarebooks.com/pages/books/2018/anthony-burgess/a-clockwork-orange.

Burgess set out as a young man to be a composer, and I felt that here in many ways. Orange employs frequent motifs, a verse-like structure, and a sense of building to a climax. Alex is affected by classical music, and that affection itself is related with a musical charge:

Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk around my bed.

Alex may just be fiddling with himself after a long day of wrecking lives, but there is a stunning beauty in this prose description that shows Burgess’s inventiveness stretched beyond just making up words.

People reading A Clockwork Orange for the first time expecting an X-rated horror show will be disappointed, but it packs real punch despite the years, thanks to Burgess’s insinuating narrative voice and his way of always keeping the plot moving forward. You find yourself liking Alex and rooting for him, which is quite a trick and a lesson in human nature, too. You can forgive an awful lot for the cause of entertainment.