Product Description

In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4875 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State - 1962 - The Right to an Answer - 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out - from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages. If anyone gest beyond that - this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin. What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917. From 1954 to 1960 he was stationed in Malaysia as an education officer - during this time he started writing The Malayan Trilogy. Diagnosed with an unoperable brain tumour in 1959, Burgess became a full-time writer and went on to write a book a year up until his death in 1993. His many works include: The Complete Enderby, Tremor of Intent, The Kingdom of the Wicked and A Clockwork Orange.

Customer Reviews

A choodessny classic
A Clockwork Orange is a novel written by Anthony Burgess and released in England in 1962. It is now considered to a classic piece of English literature, but was, at the time of release, highly controversial and parts have been banned during different periods of time.
The novel is written in three parts, similar to the music section formation A-B-A. This is a connection to both Burgess's and Alex's love of classical music. Altogether, there are twenty-one chapters, a symbol of Alex growing up at the end of the novel and slowly making changes to becoming an adult. In addition, the title A Clockwork Orange, refers to the cockney slang, "As queer as clockwork orange." The word 'clockwork' is an obvious reference to machines and a less-obvious reference to 'human'. 'Orange' is a reference to the Malay word 'orang', which means 'man', and was inspired by Burgess's stay in Malaysia during World War II.
The narration of the story is in the first-person, by fifteen year-old anti-hero Alex, in a not-so-distant future (apparently, it is set in 1995, as imagined from the 1960s). He narrates the story in a mixture of English and 'nadsat' English-a fragmented, new type of English teenage slang, based on Russian, Polari, Slavic, Cockney rhyming slang and some words made up by Burgess himself.
Alex's nights, and sometimes days, consist of murder and rape. Ironically, he uses classic cultural music, or more specifically, his favourite piece, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, to get ready for his escapades.
However, he later runs in to trouble and is at the mercy of the government, and becomes part of a psychological experiment to 'cure him' of his violent and disturbing behaviour. Burgess questions what real 'goodness' is, and what 'liberalism' is versus 'conformation' in society.

I decided to read A Clockwork Orange as I felt it fitted very well in to our current environment of a lack of morality, violence, rape, crime and overall destruction. I wanted to understand why our society is like it is today, which is similar to the dystopia described in the novel.
Burgess imbued me to believe that it is more important to be an individual than to be controlled to conform to society. Burgess believes that once someone's freedom of choice is deprived, they no longer become human; instead they become a 'machine', something which is worst than death and is most certainly not what God 'intended'. However, in opposition to this, Burgess also outlines that if individuals are left to their own devices, without any law and order, this can be equally dangerous and also destabilises society. He questions his readers on how to "weigh the values and dangers of both individual liberty and state control, and consider how much liberty we're willing to give up for order, and how much order we're willing to give up for liberty."

Although a seemingly straight forward balance of arguments, the ways in which Burgess lifts the novel are extraordinary. Unusually, he uses a teenage anti-hero to demonstrate his arguments, and Alex's childlike yet extremely intellectual wording is persuasive and allows the reader to be sympathetic to him. The use of 'nadsat'-slang jargon used by teenagers, makes the novel futuristic and unreal, giving a certain strange detachment between the reader and the novel, making it almost sci-fi-esque and the crimes distant and somewhat more bearable. Some would argue that these comedic devices undermine the book, as well as make it very individual in terms of written style.
However, ironically, by the 1960s, the violent and disrespectful behaviour demonstrated throughout the novel had already come to light and has increased since. Despite the seemingly large difference between the phonics of 'nadsat' and 'formal English', it is easy to work out what the words mean through context and a few similar phonic sounds. This makes the novel interesting, as 'nadsat' words replace some of the slang used both in the 1960s and now, for example, "horrowshow" is a replacement for 'wicked' or 'sick'.

The use of music is an interesting device, as everyone loves to listen to music to get ready to go out, get up in the morning or whatever other leisure activities they enjoy doing. Readers can relate to Alex's love of listening to music before his nightly and daily activities in a rather abstract manner, where Alex is not getting ready for a normal night out but for a night of massacre, pillage and rape. In addition, the choice of music that Burgess chooses is classic, which is unusual for most teenage hooligans to listen to. It makes Alex almost 'cool', as he is distinctively different from most of the hooligans in his generation, and shows an ironically intellectual mind, despite his thug-like activities. Alex's favourite composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, composed a lot of music associated with the Christian religion, another irony to Alex's seemingly immoral character.

I loved this book, in a rather strange way. Burgess's devices of detachment made some of it funny, particularly Alex's childlike monologues and the novel was descriptive enough to create very vivid and frightening images, but at the same time, it did not fail to make some very serious points questioning the readers on reality, morality, ethics, religion, the idea of individualism and themselves.

Highly individual and very Horrorshow, O My Brothers.
Anthony Burgess was a literary giant. Despite his wishes, this remains the work for which he is best remembered. Most will know it through the film, with which he had scant involvement but which he defended after Stanley Kubrick became fainthearted. Yet few will have read the novel.

The prose is first person, confessional, in a consistent voice, our narrator the chief protagonist, Alex. The vocabulary is a mixture of English and a language called nadsat, an invented language based primarily on Russian but also German, French, and schoolboy terminology. The idea is you work it out for yourself but around a third of it is not intuitive. (The lazy can use the nadsat dictionary.)

The story is set in a not too distant future, with a terrifyingly bleak and broken down society in the grip of a classic liberal-reactionary struggle. It could well be today if you are a pessimist. The violence and sex is handled adroitly, even imperceptibly, and not at all crudely despite its evident brutality. It translates to screen with rather less subtlety. The scene with two ten year olds would be unfilmable or inflammatory.

The first person narration brings you closer to Alex and somehow you can be both horrified and sympathetic. The treatment he is given is arguably worse than the affliction. It both saves and dooms him, looking after his mind but not his soul. An ironic twist: he can't even read the Bible without feeling sick, and is deprived equally of the means both to offend and to defend. Burgess delivers a very modern parable, shot through with arsenic.

Viddy it carefully, O My Brothers; it's real horrorshow.

Creative and Disturbing
This is a fantastic and clever book. It follows in the same vein as Orwell's 1984, but takes things that one step further. The book is narrated by the compelling anti-hero Alex. It is written in the language of the gangs of the streets of this dystopian future place, which now is not so very unlike our own society. Alex hates school and rails against authority, hanging out with his gang of thugs in the Corova Milk Bar, taking drugs, raping girls and enjoying nights of bloody mayhem.

An ill-judged robbery goes hideously wrong and Alex is incarcerated in prison, where he becomes the subject of a new social experiment which claims to reprogramme the brain so that violence is no longer an option. Alex takes us through these events and their aftermath in his peculiarly charming and yet repellent words.

Burgess takes on the big themes of social control, anarchy and free will in this fascinating and brilliant book. If you have read the book you will want to see Kubrick's film, which is also brilliant in a completely different way. If you have seen the film prepare to be wowed by the book. Stick with the language, after a while it becomes easy to read as you become immersed into Alex's world and it's well worth the effort.