Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn't just like ultra-violence – he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven's Ninth. He and his gang rampage through a dystopian future, hunting for terrible thrills. But when Alex finds himself at the mercy of the state and subject to the ministrations of Dr. Brodsky, the government psychologist, he discovers that fun is no longer the order of the day ...

The basis for one of the most notorious films ever made, A Clockwork Orange is both a virtuoso performance from an electrifying prose stylist and a serious exploration of the morality of free will.’

Clockwork Orange is a novel written by Anthony Burgess, made significantly famous by Stanley Kubrick’s film that came out in 1971. The novel takes place in a dystopian future, where teenagers are running amok and that there is no law and order. We have our main character who is a fifteen-year-old and has his friends with whom he does on a rampage, when it comes to killing people or raping women. One of the pivotal points is when Alex rapes and murders a woman, which eventually leads to his arrest.

It was a difficult book to read, I do not have a problem with novels that portray a negative character as the lead, but there is often some kind of a reason or cause, there is a complexity behind that character. Alex had none of it, he was violent for the sake of being violent. Did this dystopian future enable him to be that way? At least to me, the world created by the author does not explain this violent behaviour of Alex.

There is an element of science fiction later in the novel where Alex goes through a ‘treatment’ (I would not describe what it was to avoid spoilers) but again, despite this, he never expressed any kind of repentance for what he did.

I have not seen the film but judging by what I read in this book, I have no intention of being traumatised again by such violent images. Reading it once was sufficient.

The prose was difficult, not because the language was complex but because the author invented a language. It is a mix of cockney and for whatever reason, a lot of Russian words. Some of it was ingenious, I must admit, such as ‘horror show’, which is a corruption of the Russian word хорошо (kharasho). However, I usually do not like use of constructed language unless it is relevant to the plot and in this case, I found no relevance to the plot. Moreover, what was bizarre was that it was not that the language had evolved to this, it was only Alex and his friends who were using it and other characters seamlessly understood this language.

To conclude, it was  a story without a plot. In some stories like this, I find the idea of the plot to be interesting but poorly executed but here I did not find the idea to begin with. I award the novel a rating of three on ten.

Rating – 3/10

Have a nice day,
Andy