A Clockwork Orange (Novel)

Another book that had its 50th anniversary in 2012 that I'm just getting around to is A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, which is on all sorts of lists as one of the best books ever written in English. It was made into a famous movie by Stanley Kubrick that happens to be one of my all-time favorites, but up to now I had not read the book.

Set in the near, dystopian future, Burgess has crafted something of a satire on the various reactions to violence, and whether being good or evil is a choice or not. His narrator, Alex, is a 15-year-old hooligan that, along with three comrades, terrorizes the community nightly with "ultra-violence." Mostly that means beating and raping people.

Alex, after being arrested for murder, is chosen to undergo a treatment that uses aversion therapy--he's given medicine to make him nauseous while watching horrific images of violence--and released, but upon his release he finds that he has no place to go, and since he can't fight back without being sick he's at the mercy of those whom he wronged. Eventually he becomes a pawn in a political battle, with those who oppose the technique wondering at the ethics of making someone nonviolent not by choice, but by biological necessity.

Burgess wrote the book in three weeks in response to a plague of youth violence in Britain in the early '60s. In the newest edition he wrote: "I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased from the world's literary memory." No such luck. It was published in the U.S. without the last chapter, which was also not filmed by Kubrick, and has a downbeat ending.

The novella--it's less than 200 pages--is a fascinating read, although one must get used to something right away. Burgess crafted a language called "Nadsat" that Alex and his "droogs" speak. It's full of words that have Slavic provenance, and one must learn the words not from a glossary, but from their context. Soon it sinks in that "tolchock" is hit, "litso" is face, "ptitsa" is a woman, "devotchka" is a young woman, "smeck" is laugh, "deng" is money, and so on. The first few chapters are a bit like reading Lewis Carroll's poem Jabberwocky: "Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while the 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."

Alex is certainly a sociopath, but it's easy to root for him. Burgess doesn't attempt to persuade us he's society's victim, but he's interesting and funny and, most human of him, he adores classical music. One of the side effects he endures in the treatment is that a particularly harsh film of Nazi brutality is scored to Beethoven's Ninth, thus ending his ability to listen to music. It's the one civilized trait the boy has: "Then, brothers, it came. Oh, bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all nagoy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders." He refers to Beethoven as "lovely Ludwig Van."

The book, though fifty years old, still has relevance, as penology seems to be an never-ending state of turmoil. Punish or rehabilitate? In a nation like the U.S., which has more people incarcerated than any other nation, we could stand to read this again to figure out just what the fuck to do. Clearly there are many recidivists like Alex in our world. Is the answer removing the choice of violence, when there is no other alternative than a life behind bars?

In a few days I'll discuss Kubrick's film.