A Clockwork Orange

If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange – meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

A Clockwork Orange is a book I've always meant to read, with a movie adaptation I have always succeeded in avoiding. Even so, the book and movie are such pervasive cultural phenomena that I went into this experience with mental pictures of tall glasses of milk and bowler hats and Malcolm McDowell's eyes being forced open as he watched ultraviolent movies. Even so, I was unprepared. Unprepared for the violence, deftly cushioned by an invented language. Unprepared for the solid social commentary at the book's core. Unprepared to identify with little Alex; whether he's acting like a sociopath, being tortured in the name of reform, or being manipulated for political ends. A Clockwork Orange isn't a perfect book, but there is so much good in it that I'm sure it will stay with me forever. Long and spoiler-full from here so I can remember the details.

What's it going to be then, eh?

In the beginning, we meet Alex and his droogs – a costumed gang of juvenile delinquents that get wasted on drugged milk and rumble, rape and thieve, assaulting their bourgeois victims with impunity; in this near-future world, the government seems incapable of protecting its citizens. The invented language of nadsat (based on Russian slang and Cockney rhymes, with some Shakespearean thous and thys thrown in) does soften this depravity: the prose is so lyrical that you nearly forget that you're reading about horrible acts. Alex himself is no dumb criminal: we are to understand that he is transported by classical music (and particularly by Ludwig van), and he reaches states of ecstasy while blasting suites and concertos in his bedroom:

Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh.

What an observer wouldn't see, however, is that in these flights of fancy, the music is impelling Alex to further violence:

As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I plunging like a shlaga into them, and indeed when the music , which was one movement only, rose to the top of its highest tower, then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.

Obviously, Alex is a lost cause; a classic sociopath. When the government does begin a crackdown on crime and Alex commits an accidental murder, he is sent off to prison (it is at this point he states, “And me still only fifteen”; I was properly shocked by his tender age). The story skips ahead two years and Alex has behaved as a model prisoner, even helping out in the chapel (where he can often be seen reading a bible: just like with Beethoven, Alex is inappropriately transported by the Passion of Christ; fantasising about being a Roman soldier scourging Jesus' back, nailing him to the cross). Despite the chaplain's protests, Alex is selected for the “Ludovico Technique”; an experimental reform program that could see him released within a fortnight. This is where Alex has his eyes forced open while shown scenes of rape and murder (with footage from Nazi and Japanese concentration camps thrown in), and as he is injected with an emetic before these sessions, his body quickly learns to associate violence with crippling nausea. Since these films were usually shown with a classical music soundtrack, a side effect is that Alex can no longer bear to hear the music that he loves (and another side effect has him crippled by normal sexual attraction). It is here that the chaplain raises his loudest concern: as a man who believes in a physical hell, the chaplain worries that by removing Alex's free will, the Ludovico Technique has imperiled his soul:

Is the man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

In the last section of the book, Alex is released from prison, and when he is confronted by an old man who he and his droogs had assaulted earlier, this old guy and his friends are able to give Alex a weak-fisted beating that he is physically incapable of defending himself against. When the police are called in, Alex is horrified to see that the officers are two old acquaintances that he had mistreated: not only are these thugs indicative of the government's new tough-on-crime agenda, but they also give Alex a thumping that he can't fend off. After being dumped in the country, Alex finds shelter at a nearby home (coincidentally, a house that he and his droogs had hit), and the man who lives there is (coincidentally) an anti-government agitator who wants to exploit Alex's experiences before the upcoming election. The man's friends get involved and Alex finds himself utterly without control.

"Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?" And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: "Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?"

When the group locks Alex in a room while they decide how to use him, a neighbouring flat begins to play classical music and Alex loses control of himself; eventually jumping out the window in a suicidal fit. He wakes up in hospital, where he has been informed that the doctors were able to surgically reverse the Ludovico Technique. The American version of the book (and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation) end here; with Alex plotting to resume his old life. In the original British version, the final chapter sees Alex with his new crew of droogs. Alex has become bored with the fighting and the old in-out in-out and begins to fantasise about a cottage of his own; a cosy fire, a wife, a son that he can protect from harm. In the prologue to my edition, Anthony Burgess gripes that the American publisher insisted on the cut – explaining that the redemptive ending is veddy veddy British to Stateside readers – but Burgess makes the point that without the character experiencing growth, it's not technically a novel. Even knowing this going in, it was hard for me to decide where A Clockwork Orange should have ended. As I immediately watched the movie after finishing the book, I couldn't imagine it with the redemptive epilogue tacked on; in a way, Alex being allowed to choose his life of crime is a type of growth and I don't know if the idea that teen hooliganism is just a natural phase that one goes through is a conclusion that I'm comfortable with.

A Clockwork Orange is the type of book that, upon finishing, makes me immediately want to know more about its author. Here is what I learned: Anthony Burgess was from Manchester (and imagined the setting of this book as a Manchester/Leningrad/NYC hybrid); he was a polyglot (who not only understood the Russian that he borrowed for his nadsat slang, but invented the language used in Quest for Fire); while he was in the army, his  wife was brutally raped by four deserting American soldiers (which inspired the savage attack on the writer's wife in this book); he was a self-taught pianist and classical composer (and would have preferred to have been remembered for his music); after being misdiagnosed with a brain tumour, he quickly dashed off a bunch of novels as a type of widow's pension (he claimed to have written A Clockwork Orange in just three weeks and never thought it one of his best books); he was considered a mythomaniac and any or all of the preceding facts may have been invented. Apparently, the title of this book is from traditional Cockney, and the first time that Burgess heard someone say, “That's as queer as a clockwork orange”, the writer inside him filed it away as a perfect metaphor for something. When, in the early Sixties, Burgess read an article about the government considering aversion therapy to deal with juvenile delinquency, he knew he had found that something: in a way, you can perfectly see the influences that led to the writing of this book, and yet, in a lesser writer's hands, this might have been mere violence-porn. Even so, Burgess himself said later, “A Clockwork Orange is too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his job to show.” And to a degree I agree with him – not only is the theme of free will vs social control repeated over and over, but even the lovely subtlety of the title is lost through frequent repetition; it was even the title of the book that was being written by the author/activist within the book:

Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: "That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?" Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high preaching goloss: "– 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, against this I raise my swordpen –"

(I did note that the phrase was never used once in the movie, but perhaps not incidentally, when I asked Dave and Kennedy if they caught the meaning of the title from the film, they did not.) It is only this slight tendency towards didacticism that made me say that this is not a perfect novel, but the lyricism of the invented language and the brilliance of the central theme force me to not reduce my rating by much; this is a rounding up to a full five stars. I loved it.

And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.

More from Burgess, and his views on government control vs free will, can be read here. 

Before I started reading this book, I was thinking that my first encounter with the story was when Ken had bought the Mad Magazine with the movie parody for A Clockwork Orange on the cover, and that he, and then I, had read it on a summer roadtrip over to PEI:

But could that be true? That says it came out in June '73 -- Ken would have been just nearly 7 (and he would have been 7 by the summer and our trip) and I would have been 5 1/2 -- would we really have been reading Mad Magazine and a parody of this X-rated movie at that age? I have a perfect memory of doing just that...