Bonus Book! A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Social Criticism (1962 - 141 pp.)

A Clockwork Orange is one of the many 20th-century classics I failed to pounce on as a reader until far too late. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex, the protagonist and narrator, navigates a Sovietized dystopian England in the book's present day (c. 1962), committing murder, rape, assault, and getting into gang wars before being locked up, treated by experimental psychiatry, and then released back into a world he no longer understands. The lack of reform Alex understands is evident in how casually he narrates these jarring events.

Alex's disconnect from any sort of political history, heritage or tradition marks him as clearly living in the now. Despite living in England, he refers to "Victoria flatblock after some victory or other", (43) apparently unaware of Queen Victoria or of any of the United Kingdom's great victories over the centuries. It is not as though Alex is completely uneducated, as he is a budding classical music expert. Crystallography, an unnamed subject of study, is lost to the sands of time due to "a poisonous young swine" destroying all the books. (107) The "F. Alexander" who writes the intra-novel book "A Clockwork Orange" is probably Alex, although this is never confirmed, and Alex refers to a different characters as its author; even so, the book is something that only exists in Alex's recounting of his age 15-19 years.* Alex plainly has no future, even at the end of the book, even after his release from his prison, when the staff list a number of jobs Alex can perform but he shows little interest in them. Equally so, Alex has no past. None of Alex's childhood prior to the start of the book is ever revealed.

The book's locations are bright in my eyes. The Duke of New York is only one word off from a restaurant/pub/bar where I used to attend events in the halcyon pre-COVID days. The Korova milk bar takes a mainstay of communist-era Poland, the milk bar, and transplants it into a dingy, gritty, impoverished England. Alex's frequent returns to these places, inevitably in search of liquid (brandy and milk, respectively - he never orders food), make him see the world through alcohol and milk. In one of Alex's more frightening pre-prison episodes, he serves Scotch to ten-year-old girls (and that's just the beginning). The night before this episode, when Alex returns home to his mother's refreshingly unadulterated glass of milk, Alex recites one of the great one-liners of the whole book: "How wicked, my brothers, innocent milk must always seem to me now." (26) Whether this one-liner is Alex's commentary on the altered state of his life, ominous foreshadowing, or both, the "always" carries forward right to end of Alex's story.

Usually, a 141-page book that flows conversationally and reads as quickly as an airport novel would be a very easy read. In A Clockwork Orange's case, what makes the book difficult to read is part of its charm: Alex's constant use of Anglo-Slavic slang. The first time you read a phrase like "there was no need from the point of view of crasting some more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in and alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts", (3) it is virtually incomprehensible, but Alex's linguistic foibles are quickly absorbed. Alex's countercultural way of speech is subverted near the end of the book, when Georgina says Alex "talks funny" while giggling; Pete informs her that is really how he and Alex used to talk. (138) Similarly, Dim reminds Alex that he "was young", emphasizing the past tense. (110) By the end of the book, Dim is a police officer, Alex is unemployed, and, mysteriously, Alex is also a father. Is all the slang, and by continuation Alex's attitude, swept away by the simple process of growing up?

Ease of Reading: 4

Educational Content: 3

*For another example of an intra-novel book having the same title as the book it's in, see Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, coincidentally also released in 1962.