A classic of modern literature (A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess)

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Date:	10/09/09 (11 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Superb use of language

Disadvantages: Requires a lot of flicking to the index to decipher the slang

A Clockwork Orange is a revolutionary, classic novel by Anthony Burgess that was most famously adapted into a highly controversial film by legendary director Stanley Kubrick in 1971. However, the film's success is owed in large part to this novel, which the film very faithfully adapts.

The novel's narrator is a young Londoner named Alexander Delarge, who is rather bored with life and spends most of his time either drinking at a milk bar, or hanging out with his three friends, The Droogs, and embarking on various acts of "ultra violence", from beating homeless men half to death, to one evening breaking into a writer's family home and raping his wife. However, on one occasion, Alexander is caught by the police after beating a woman to death with a ceramic penis, and is sentenced to a long prison term. However, he learns about a new experimental corrective technique called the Ludovico technique, which conditions the criminal to associate heinous acts of violence with nausea and illness, thereby preventing crime.

Burgess' vision of a dystopian future in which the government encroaches upon the mind of a criminal is extremely chilling, enhanced further by Burgess' superb standard of writing, which, in using Cockney slang, is extremely original, and also enhances some of the more disturbing elements of the book, as well as add some much needed humour to the precedings (particularly when he calls eggs "eggi-weggs").

Although perhaps not as recognised as Orwell's 1984, A Clockwork Orange is a disturbing look at one possible future, where the onset of psychology and moreover, our furthering belief in its veracity, launches us towards an ever-invasive government that endeavours to erase crime, but at the costs of personality and self-expression, as violent and as heinous as Alex's crimes are.

A Clockwork Orange is a classic of English literature, that's disturbing, often challenged, and insanely original. Brilliant.

Summary: A classic, pure and simple