What’s it to be then ‘eh? (A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess)

Member Name: Paradox

Product:	A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Date:	08/03/01 (206 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Classic

Disadvantages: Over-hyped just a bit

“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard through dry.”

‘A Clockwork Orange’ is the famous book written by Anthony Burgess, first published in 1962, it follows the activities of Alex and his friends as they harass and rape various victims.

Alex speaks in Nadsat, a mixture of broken Russian, the author’s own choice of slang and Shakespearean English. It can be picked up and understood quite well by the time you reach the end of the book. But it will be a tad daunting at first.

The storyline of the book surrounds the nasty deeds that Alex and his friends carry out on their unsuspecting prey. One of the victims that has his wife raped by Alex and Co. is working on a book called ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Alex finds this work and reads a bit of it out:

“The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation…”

Alex likes violence, he likes to see blood flowing, and in order to get him hyped up for this, and he and his friends frequent the Korova milkbar, which sells milk plus, milk plus some sort of drug that enhances the joy of ultra-violence.

Incidentally, no other novella has influenced as many people as ‘A Clockwork Orange’, many bands have taken their name from the Nadsat terminology used in the book, Moloko for example are quoted as saying that their band name came from the drug-enhanced drink in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which is of course, technically wrong, because Moloko is just normal milk…

At this point the book reminds me of Orwell, and his ‘Animal FarmR
17;. There is a struggle for power that results in Alex fighting some of his friends for his ‘rightful place as leader’.

They then attack again, only this time Alex commits a murder, and his friends turn on him, leaving him helpless, and he is picked up by the Police and sent to State Prison.

While in prison, he hears of a new technique, the Ludavico technique, that gets you out of prison and back onto the streets in less than a fortnight, and he ends up being one of the first to be subject to the new idea.

During his conditioning he is forced to watch nasty films while being injected with a drug, the violence makes him very ill, and after a fortnight of this, the injections are no longer needed, and the illness comes naturally. During these films, music is played, classical music, of which Alex is very fond, and after the conditioning, listening to this music also makes him feel ill.

After a brief display, he is released, only to be attacked, picked up by his traitorous friends who are now Policemen and left in the country after a brutal beating from them. He stumbles across a building that just happens to be the home of F. Alexander, the author of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, he is familiar with the technique, and wants to use Alex as a form of ensuring that the current Government are not re-elected.

Things go wrong when Alexander discovers that Alex is the boy responsible for his wife’s suicide and tries to make Alex kill himself by playing Beethoven loudly through the floorboards, and this brings on the sickness in Alex so bad, that he jumps out of a window.

He re-awakens in a Hospital to discover that he has been cured, and the Minister of the Interior wants to be friends with him.

It is while reading the book that you notice another similarity to Orwell, and the very 1984ish feel that this book contains.

The book contains an extra chapter, that the film does not, and
I’ll include this information for those of you that have been limited to the film only.
The chapter is about Alex re-starting with a new group of friends, everything the same as it was before, but then, he grows tired of the life he has, and simply stops being the villain he was.

This make’s Burgess’s point in a way that the film fails to do, it shows that once such conditioning has taken place, man loses his ability to make decisions and becomes ‘A Clockwork Orange’ – an organic machine on a pre-determined path. If Alex grows tired of this life it is, however, perfectly acceptable, as it’s the same result, only with the ability to make decisions secured.

Will the book be read or the film watched because it’s an interesting and important story, or because it was banned and people want to see what all the hype is about?

It doesn’t really matter, as long as you’ve seen / read it, and once you’ve done that, you’ll wonder why it was ever banned… *




* Or you’ll be aware it’s because Kubrick was receiving death-threats because teens were mimicking Alex and his friends.

Summary: