A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess: Review
Book: A Clockwork Orange. Date of Publication: January 1, 1962. Pages: 191. Genre: Science Fiction.
A Clockwork Orange is a bizarre roller coaster ride of intense and conflicting emotion. The best way I can describe it is like eating a whole tub of ice cream in one sitting. Happy, guilty. Satisfied, nauseous. Above all, deeply disempowered.
Social Satire
Our Humble Narrator is Alex, a teenage delinquent who spends his days playing hooky and his nights terrorizing the law abiding populace with his friends. After a home invasion gone wrong he is abandoned by his gang to solely take blame for the death of their target. Alex is sent to prison where he is offered an early release in exchange for his consent to be subject to an experimental procedure designed to “reform” him. Thus begins his treatment using the Ludovico Technique which involves being injected with drugs that make him feel ill while being forced to watch ultra-violent content on a screen. This conditions an automatic aversion to violent acts of any kind. Even the thought of it causes Alex to recoil and beg forgiveness from his would-be victim. The government proclaims its great success in transforming a ne’er-do-well who countless correctional schools, loving parents, and even prison failed to reform, into a model citizen.
It is the strongest of indictments. Against a society that could nurse such a viper as Alex has become. Against a principle-less government that sees its only mandate as lowering the crime rate by any means. Against the arrogance of science that sees free will as a troublesome secondary effect of cognition. Burgess explores similar questions of what it means to be good or bad as Michael Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. In it, a eugenicist implants a dog with the pituitary gland and testicles of a criminal with strong Soviet sympathies. His aim is to improve the human race by transforming vicious individuals into people with the kind-hearted nature of man’s best friend. Of course the experimental subject becomes an uncontrollable jerk who justifies all his poor behavior with proletarian rhetoric. The surgeon’s assistant remarks that he is a man with the heart of a dog. But rather the problem is that he is a dog with the mind of a man. He is given a position of power by the local government and begins exterminating the city’s cats to make coats for the working class.
Sympathy for the Devil
PICARD: It’s a terrifying prospect to lose control of one’s mind. When I was young, I remember watching my grandfather deteriorate from a powerful, intelligent figure to a frail wisp of a man, who could barely make his own way home.
Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 4 Episode 17. “Night Terrors”
It’s quite unpleasant to be confronted with the truth that our conscience, our high-minded ideals, our morals, exist only at the whim of the electric impulses of the brain. Watching Alex be systematically conditioned to abhor violence is almost like watching schoolboys rip the wings off flies and seeing what’s left, crawling pitifully in circles. Alex’s defenselessness incites the worst sadistic tendencies in everyone he encounters. He is unceremoniously turned out by his parents and the lodger they have taken to replace him. He is brutalized by his old crew who have been given police badges by the government. The old man he roughs up in one of the first outings of the novel recognizes him and attacks him with no resistance. Alex is without a doubt a terrible person but he is in many ways a product of his environment and stripping him of his terribleness seems to strip him of the adaptations he needs to survive.
The Famous Nadsat
Lastly, a note on the invented teenage slang used by our protagonist which borrows heavily from Russian. My edition has a glossary at the end (which I only found out after finishing the book). It’s confusing for the first 20 pages or so after which you start deciphering the mappings. And it leads to such hilarious moments as Alex’s half-hearted retelling of the Bible:
This Sunday morning the charlie read out from the book about chellovecks who slooshied the slovo and didn’t take a blind bit being like a domy built upon sand, and then the rain came splash and the old booma-boom cracked the sky and that was the end of that domy. But I thought that only a very dim veck would build his domy upon sand, and a right lot of real sneering droogs and nasty neighbors a veck like that would have, them not telling him how dim he was doing that sort of building.
[Pg. 81]
