A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

For A Clockwork Orange, I fall into the camp of those who saw the film adaptation before reading the novella. Not that this diminished my enjoyment in any way, yet it did dictate how I was to visualise the characters, and more particularly, hear their dialogue, which is what this book is best known for. The fictitious Nadsat, or teenage slang, featured in the book, has long been a favourite invented language of mine, and the Folio edition comes with a comprehensive glossary for those not familiar with the terms. I can appreciate that reading without prior knowledge of Nadsat must be a very confusing and tedious undertaking, enough so, one might even suggest, to render it intolerable. This is the second time I have read the book, therefore I did not encounter such trials of comprehension and could fully appreciate the great wit and energy with which it was composed. Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange during the freshness of youth and as such, was later embarrassed that it outstripped his later, more mature works in terms of success.

The story begins with teenage delinquent Alex DeLarge and his three 'droogs' in a milk bar preparing for an evening of 'ultraviolence', which typically involves knife assault, theft, and rape.The plot is set in a dystopian future England where callous youth has the older populace cowering indoors at night and a self-serving government largely turning a blind eye. When Alex oversteps the bounds of his thuggery by accidentally murdering a woman during a botched robbery, he is sentenced to a long stint in prison. Eventually he is selected to be used as a guinea pig in a controversial reformation program that psychologically conditions behaviour through mind altering drugs, a process known as the Ludovico Technique. The supposed cure to his wrongdoings backfires when Alex is stripped of all self-will and moral choice, compelled to do good through fear of physical sickness, and thrown back into a vengeful world. The philosophical and moral messages may be quite two-dimensional but the strength of the piece lies in its verbal banter and nightmarescape imagery straight from an Hieronymus Bosch painting. The Folio edition is illustrated by Ben Jones and introduced by Irvine Welsh.

Rating: 4/5