A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
Summary
Alex, a fifteen year old gang leader in an unnamed near future Britain, narrates his own campaign of robbery, assault and rape in Nadsat, a slang Burgess invented from Russian roots, Cockney rhyming slang and pure invention, so that violence arrives filtered through a voice too playful and musical to sit comfortably with what it describes. Betrayed by his own gang and imprisoned for beating a woman to death, Alex volunteers for the experimental Ludovico Technique, an aversion treatment that conditions him to feel violent nausea at the thought of violence, and at the classical music he loves, whether he wants the cure or not. Released as a supposedly reformed man, Alex becomes a tool passed between political factions eager to use his suffering for their own arguments about free will and state power, until the conditioning eventually breaks down and his old appetite for violence returns. In Burgess's original British ending, a twenty one chapter closes the book with Alex, now eighteen, growing bored with violence on his own and beginning, tentatively, to imagine an ordinary adult life; American publishers cut that chapter entirely, insisting on a darker ending that leaves Alex unchanged and unrepentant.
Nadsat is the real experience of reading the book: disorienting for the first chapters, then strangely fluent by the middle, forcing a reader to inhabit Alex's pleasure in violence through language too inventive to simply reject. Burgess wrote the novel as what he called a jeu d'esprit in about three weeks, and it reads with exactly that speed and control, a short, propulsive book built entirely around one unresolved question about whether a forced good is good at all.
William Heinemann published A Clockwork Orange in Britain in 1962, using the full twenty one chapter text American editions would not fully restore until 1986.
Historical Context & Significance
No prize marked A Clockwork Orange on arrival in 1962; its early reception ran instead through reviewers arguing about what it was doing rather than judges deciding whether it deserved anything. Kingsley Amis called it a cheerful sort of horror, Roald Dahl found it terrifying and marvelous, and the Sunday Times dismissed it as brutal and psychologically shallow, a split that has never entirely resolved.
Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, based on the truncated American text and its bleaker ending, brought the book far wider attention than it had found on its own, and also brought controversy Kubrick had not anticipated: reported copycat crimes in Britain led him to withdraw the film from UK distribution himself, a ban that held until after his death in 1999. Burgess spent much of his later career visibly frustrated that this one short book, written quickly and, in his own account, never intended as his masterpiece, had come to overshadow everything else he wrote. Recognition eventually caught up with it anyway: the Libertarian Futurist Society inducted it into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 2008, and Time placed it on its 2005 list of the hundred best English language novels since 1923.