Book Review: 'A Clockwork Orange' by Anthony Burgess

”It might not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good.”

This is the third time I have read this book, the first as a teenager, around Alex’s age; and the around fifteen years between the readings since. Each time I've experienced the story differently; each time, My Friend and Humble Narrator seems to have told me a different kind of story. But always ... a human story. And always, a warning

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  A 1964 pre-movie cover with a pre-movie take on Alex & droogs, thanks to Luke's collection.

Kubrick’s vision for the story looms ever-large; and it’s almost impossible to see Alex and his droogs in any other way. Or hear them in any other way.

“I have heard of A Clockwork Orange. I have not read it but I have heard of it.”

But you can, if you can allow the Nadsat tongue to penetrate you, the lingual in-out-in-out, and feel the inner music of it in the exposition. A sentence like this a good example:

It was very cally and vonny, with one bulb in the ceiling with fly-dirt like obscuring its bit of light, and there were early rabbiters slurping away at chai and horrible-looking sausages and slices of kleb which they like wolfed, going wolf wolf wolf and then creeching for more.

There’s the rescue from Kubrick: Burgess giving his narrator his gulliver to place the scene in yours. Kubrick has style, but he doesn't have this. Alex use of the word ‘like’ as a filler in his language is something I hadn't noticed much before. And he will even use ‘like and like’ on occasion, with filler followed by simile.

“Yarbles,” I said, like snarling like a doggie. “Bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine.”

And there is a movement in the way he speaks to us throughout the tale, from the less intimate and conspiratorial while he is with his pack of droogs, until we, the readers, kind of replace them ... and are then replaced ourselves:

“There was never any trust,” I said, bitter, wiping off the krovvy with my rooker. “I was always on my oddy knocky.”

... until the very final chapter, when we again become droogs, of a nostalgic sort. So what’s it all about? What’s it going to be then, eh?

 

It’s fine to say it’s about good and evil, that’s a starting point, and about choice, and how choice/free will interplays with being human: our capacity for choice. And Burgess’s Catholicism, lapsed or otherwise, plays a role in his vision. Alex capacity for choice, at the start of each Part, and at the start of Part 3 Chapter 7, are all limited in varying ways, based on a whole range of social concerns. That he chooses to do evil, and that this is bad for society as a whole, Alex is in touch with, he understands that ‘...you can’t run a country with every chelloveck comporting himself in my manner of the night.’

But what I do I do because I like to do.

A kind of rollicking ongoing self-explosion of id never quite brought to ground? Can we trust him? Of course, nay. The Prison Chaplain very briefly touches on some of the extrapolations of the idea of imposed goodness, the clockwork orange. He wonders if a man who chooses to do bad (sin) is in some way better than the man who does good (is righteous) but does it without choice. Since Free Will must be part of God’s plan, to remove it would be more of the Devil than to be devilish. Then he tries to get around the situation be asking if it is okay to be deprived of choice if THAT is your choice. No choice can be honestly made without understanding the ramifications of course.

 

But it is, of course, his relationship with the State that is the most affecting one. Alex takes his tolchocks from the State in his stride, more or less. He understands the Prison Warden’s eye-for-an-eye position better than the Chaplain’s; and both better than the Minister of the Inferior or the Interior’s. But F. Alexander, the writer of the A Clockwork Orange inside our A Clockwork Orange, understands the State’s position all to well.

“The tradition of liberty means all. The common people will let it go, oh yes. They will sell liberty for a quieter life.”

And this is just as contemporary now as it was then, but with different dynamics in play. Yes, most of us don’t want Alex and his like wandering the streets at will, and if good could be imposed upon them, making them not-as-human, we’d easily fall back on the idea that they’re not human anyway. They’re animals. They’re beasts. They’re thugs, rapists, killers, we’d creech. And we’d be there, in the auditorium, watching the results, and guffing and smecking with the best and worst of them. But what may not be allowed to us, some day, in order to stop ‘rioting and breaking the State’s Peace’? But what might be done?

“I am everyone’s friend,” I said. “Except to my enemies.”
“All who do me wrong,” I said, “are my enemies.”

The State’s biggest problem with an Alex, with his self service, narcissism and socio-pathology hiding under a thin veneer of good manners, smiles and false-friendship is that it too closely resembles its own. Alex is much worse to the State than a criminal, a wrong-doer; or even a rival party group, like F. Alexander ... Alex is a competitor.



When the Min takes his photo op. and discusses F. Alexander’s actions against Alex (and his motivations may have been personal or political ... that doesn’t matter one bit, of course), he starts by saying to Alex that he knew something, then says he thought he knew it, throwing doubt on what we know to be truth. Then Alex says:

“What you mean,” I said, “is that he was told.”
“He had this idea,” said the Min.

We’re left with stories and ideas. And a world where Alex lives, and the State lives; but while Alex may shift and shudder through a maturity many would argue he does not deserve, and ill-fits him, and is unlikely to happen anyway, the State will prepare its people to better except the trade off between a quiet life and becoming clockworked. It’s happening now. Maybe not exactly like Burgess imagined, O my brothers. But viddy it dobby, viddy it all bolshy horrowshow.

A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers.