January 2022. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
1962, W. W. Norton and Company, 209 pages. Written in English (sort of), read in English.
It turns out Anthony Burgess does not think A Clockwork Orange is his best novel. Nor does he appreciate, perhaps for the same reason, that the Stanley Kubrick movie adaptation of his novel garnered so much undying success. Both of these facts are revealed in the introduction to the edition of the novel I’ve read, just a few pages in, and they are immediately followed by another fact, that may explain both — the novel has been carefully constructed to contain twenty one chapters: Three sections of seven chapters each. Each of these sections is a distinct part of the arc of Alex, the protagonist of the novel. But in the original American edition, there were only twenty chapters — the last was removed at the request of the American publisher, and a cash starved Burgess, at the time, could not refuse. The movie is also based on that malformed edition, which means that as far as Burgess himself is concerned, the movie has a false ending, and everybody who knows only the movie, or only the American edition, does not know the actual arc of A Clockwork Orange as it was originally devised. Burgess goes on to indicate, in that same introduction, that the original American edition, with its twenty chapters, is merely a parable, but the twenty one chapters edition is a real novel. Therefore this edition, a revised American one, contains the erstwhile missing chapter, and order is restored onto the world.
Apart from that one missing chapter, the movie is fairly loyal to the narrative, and casual watchers of the movie, like myself, will not feel lost in the book. There is the same senseless display of violence by Alex and his gang, the betrayal of his friends and the mishap that lends him in jail, and then the government’s ploy to find a way to rid the streets of violence without filling the country’s jails which provides Alex with an opportunity to go through a pioneering mind-control program that guarantees that he will not have any violent urges; when he is released from jail, he is haunted by victims and partners from the past who want to take revenge, among them a victim representing a group that wants to use Alex as a symbol and a martyr against the government’s decision. Eventually a series of events which are partially revenge, and partially a plot to encourage Alex to become a martyr, cause him to become “cured” of his inability to do violence, and the whole story comes full circle — at least in the old American edition, it does.
The one additional chapter that this version has, completely changes the point of the book — after having been conditioned to be physically ill when encountering violence, and after having been reverted back to his original urges following his attempted suicide, Alex eventually decides that he’s overgrown his violent phase and would like to settle down and become a law abiding citizen, a family man. Civilisation’s aim to control violence and eliminate it, it seems, has been in vain because it has just eventually disappeared anyway. At the crossroads of nature, nurture and free will, Alex chooses free will and negates everything society is trying to force onto its violent inhabitants.
There is also the question of the vocabulary. If you’ve flipped through the novel, or started in earnest through the first page, you will have noticed that it’s not really in English. The language that Burgess employs, a slang dialect that is a futuristic echo of cockney rhyming slang, is called Nadsat, in the protagonist’s words. Some editions of the book have a dictionary explaining what each word means — the edition that I’ve read does not. But eventually, after a chapter or two, one becomes used to the flow, and understands the strange vocabulary by its context. Eventually the repetition of words allows even to understand their direct mapping to their proper English counterparts. Eventually, it becomes clear that this is not only an artistic choice but also a thematic device — except for Alex and his droogs, and maybe the rival gangs, nobody else in the novel understands what he’s talking about. We, the readers, should be at the same level as those other characters. If we are in their shoes, and we are still identifying with Alex, the novel has reached its aim.
The February 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Divided Self by R.D. Laing.
The March 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard.
The April 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be the Illiad by Homer.
