general

This is the first book I've read by Burgess. It will NOT be the last. It's been quite a while since I've been so enthusiastic about a book!

Burgess creates a tale about twisted teenagers, who's life is dedicated to violence. In their eyes, the more people hurt, the better. When the police capture Alex (leader of the gang), instead of sending him off to jail, they use him as an experiment. He is given to the government as a lab rat for a new "treatment" that boasts criminals can finally re-enter society, and instead of being a danger, will be a constructive and completely "corrected" citizen. However, the method has it's down sides, and leaves Alex completely defenseless. He is quickly and easily driven insane by a group manipulating him in a scheme to prove the government wrong. I won't give any details, and I'm not going to give away the ending, but even if you knew the whole story from start to finish, every twist and turn, A Clockwork Orange would stilll be this good.

What makes this book so fantastic is Burgess's ability to tear you apart. Throughout the book, Alex narrates as if you were his friend. You go through everything with him, and then you begin to feel sorry for him! All the while, I couldn't help but think, "I SHOULDN'T feel sorry for Alex!". I was completely split. It really breaks down traditional good and evil. When I began reading, I thought, Alex and his "droogs" are the evil, the government is good..typical theme... As I read furthur, however, I began to question which was good and which was truly evil. Then you see that not everything breaks down into black and white. A Clockwork Orange is certainly no ordinary tale. It questions all kinds of things that most authors never really take the time to question. Questions that don't really have definitive answers.. that will keep you thinking longg after you're done the book.

The language that Burgess created for the book sets the mood and puts you in the story once you get the hang of it. I had anticipated it being much harder, and printed out a long "Nadsat Glossary", which was completely unnecessary. There aren't any words that you won't be able to figure out from the context.

I also thought that I should address the fact that the original version of the book has 21 chapters in it, and the movie cuts out the last chapter. I've never seen the movie, but without the last chapter the book would be quite different, without as much meaning. So even if you've watched the movie, you should read the book.

I can't think of the last time I read a book that made me smile, laugh, and gasp in horror and discust all within 192 pages. And when it was all over, I came away satisfied, feeling like I'd actully got something out of the novel. It's really an amazing book.

A Clockwork Orange is the story of good and evil and the value of choice. The main character, is a 15 year old lad named Alex whose life consists of crime, cruelty, and recklessness. After being betrayed by an accomplice, he is sentenced to prison where he volunteers for a program that corrects the seemingly uncorrectable. Only then does he being to suffer the consequences of his crash and burn lifestyle.

A Clockwork Orange is what I believe to be a fabulous novel. It may confuse a reader at the start because of the language, but its not that hard to understand the slang dialect if you have a firm grasp on English and are a few pages into the book. Also, one must be patient when reading it because the main ideas aren't revealed until later in the novel. There is a lot of building up the characters before hand, which is valuable information but may bore those who are already have a distaste for the book's violent nature. I also highly recommend that you read the British version because the last or 21st chapter is quite important.

Anyways, the book is more oriented those who can see past the gore and sex and can grasp the main ideas the author is trying to convey through a clockwork orange.

This is Burgess's most famous novel, largely to the controversial treatment of it by Kubrick. As with most famous novels, there is the danger of disappointment because they are so hyped up. This was the case with me, until I was about halfway through. Then, because it was sufficiently different from the movie, I realised that it was good beyond the hype. And overall, it is the fact that Burgess has condensed quite a lot of ideas onto about 150 easy pages that makes this book a great read. If it was much longer (like so many other thematic books of novels-of-ideas) it would lose its tolchok...

Speaking of tolchoks, this would be the most challenging part of the novel - nadsat. The narrator is Alex, a juvenile delinquent living in a somewhat not-too-distant-and-certainly-dystopian future, where Britain is quite close to being a police state and where crime is such that the "delinquencies" of little Alex involve rape, murder and other examples of ultra-violence. Furthermore, the teens in this future speak nadsat, a slang peppered with Russian expressions. The first page should be quite a shock to those who don't know Russian (and if like me you do know it, there's the feature of figuring out what Russian word the Anglicised string of letters is meant to symbolise). Anyhow, you can think of it as a cloze passage and in a few pages, you should be fluent. If not, there are excellent resources on the internet, such as Wikipedia's nadsat entry. As for the purpose of this deliberate difficulty, it's actually worthwhile in highlighting the superficial and brutal subculture Alex lives in.

The novel is divided into three parts. Part 1 is Alex and his friends running amok and basically doing what they like. Part 2 is Alex in prison, and the famous Ludovico's "rehabilitation" technique. Part 3 is Alex back in the world, with a difference.

The book is seen to explore free-will and the choice to do good and evil. As such, we climb into the head of someone who would most likely be described as a sociopath in conventional terms. He commits acts of violence simply because this is what he genuinely enjoys. And to go against the stereotype of the low-IQ bum, Alex is considerably intelligent and has a true passion for classical music. This sets up the background of a world-gone-mad. Then, Alex is treated with a technique that physically conditions him to be unable to do harm to anyone. Of course, the prison chaplain is against this but according to the Minister of the Interior, at least it will help in the seemingly-hopeless fight against violence.

Alex immediately becomes front-page material and a political pawn from all sides of the spectrum. Burgess examines the nature of our society, where politics and public perception are at the heart of every issue, and where both sides can become involved in dirty and partisan tactics. Also, the inconsistencies of the way society brings people up, incarcerates, punishes and attempts to rehabilitate criminals is a major idea.

The good thing is that it is unclear to me what moral lesson Burgess was actually attempting to espouse. He really lets the reader draw their own conclusions, more so than most writers. Finally, some of the early editions cut the last chapter, making the novel more edgy and dark (this is the case in the film). The last chapter (part 3, chapter 7) is an actual resolution. People have argued whether it makes the novel better or not. I think it does make it better because it casts irony on the tortuous attempts to rehabilitate Alex. But try to get an edition with the last chapter so you can see what Burgess intended originally.

Because it seems that somehow, violence is still with us *just a bit*, and the Clockwork opens up the recesses of evil and not-so-evil and its such a concise read makes it a great novel of the 20th century, and more original than many other dystopias.