Personal Review of A Clockwork Orange

I have a few people I admire in my life for their knowledge of literature.
One is my old English literature teacher. She has a massive collection of books reaching from the top end of one of her walls in her old English home that used to be "The Mermaid Pub", right to the other end.
I have borrowed many books from her ranging in a wide selection of varieties.
I still visit her, from time to time, and we still have deep literary conversations that first developed when I was still a student.
I asked her, one day after I had read A Clockwork Orange,
"Have you read A Clockwork Orange?"
She answered yes, as I had suspected.
"Did like you like it?" I asked.          
“Oh, my dear!" She replied “I like nice books!"
She has the most charming English accent.

A Clockwork Orange is most certainly NOT a nice book. It is a book about thoughtless teen crime, abuse and undeserved violence. However when I first read it, I was amazed. I was a grim person, I suppose I still am. But what amazed me most were the use of witty language and the deepness of the points it gave regarding free will and the psyche of a disgusting yet intriguing individual.

I first picked up the book through the mention of its film through my boyfriend;
“It’s a messed up film… Have you seen it?”
I have always preferred the book to the film, so when I saw it in the modern classics section in Waterstones I purchased it without hesitation.

It is a difficult book to read, mainly because of the originality of the words that the author Anthony Burgess has chosen as the language preface of the complex and disturbing character of Alex.
The words chosen by Burgess relate to roots in literature and Russian to give dark insane humour to the character. “Burgess called this language nadsa, a transliteration of the Russian suffix for “teen” says the introduction of my copy. It continues to say that the author had imagined this to become a part of the culture in sometime circa 1972. This is yet another reason I love this book;
It is a sci-fi novel set in the dark aspects of our future. I could spend a long time writing about the changes of words through influence of Russian, however as this is not an essay I wish to pass them and get on to why I like this novel.

The first thing that really intrigued me, was that no matter how much I tried to dislike the star criminal of this novel, I just couldn’t. And doesn’t this highly intelligent cultured little bastard embody our real concerns about criminals? Most of us think of humans turning to violent crime as either hurt in their prior life or as uneducated or unsophisticated, where as Alex challenges these thought by being all the things I mentioned. He is a fifteen year old who enjoys classical music and from what Burgess implies an intellectual individual. So what is this despicable rebellion all about?
We never find the cause of it.

This novel also shows us the darker side of a government struggling with the increasing crime rate through corruption and senselessness. The setting that Burgess provides is a dark one, a system that can no longer deal with the mindless outlaws of its time or “moloko” the preferred drug. And so this government funds in psychological experiments in which to turn its outlaws into honest, kind, respectable individuals of society.

Young Alex is the first to be used and the experiment proves successful. So that even the slightest bit of violent thought causes nausea and the all other things the experimenters condition him to feel. Which is another reason I love this novel, having done some studying into the core experiments of psychology during my college years. Operant conditioning was made to make baby Albert, who was a fearless baby, into fearing all white things. And so operant conditioning is made Alex to fear all violent things and to ensure that kindness reigns dominant over his heart after all the terrible things he has done. 

Thrown back into civil life Alex finds that the people he has wronged are out to coincidentally get a vengeance on him. He is unable to defend himself because of his conditioning. I find this a tremendous example of Karma. What goes around comes around. And so it does.

The most underlying “moral” in this novel, in my view, is the fact that you cannot install within a person feelings that do not belong within them. It is a novel defending free will, however wrong it may be. That false kindness and forced softness does not lead to accepted redemption. That no amount of forced human interference can make a positive effect on the intentions and the past of an individual.  That all mistakes and grievances lead to a road that is discovered through time by the individual itself. Nothing can rightly interfere with the road we must all take through life.

I did not talk of how it ends as I do not want to ruin it for anyone who has read this and want to read the book. I hope you enjoyed my “as short as a review can be” review of A Clockwork Orange.