A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
Book Review by Jeff Edwards
Have you read this book?
Once you get your rookers on this book, you will viddy your glazzies on a real horrorshow tale of ultraviolence and razrezzing and other veshches. Alex, Your Humble Narrator, is a malenky malchick who govoreets in nadsat, a like slang. To get used to the nadsat without going bezoomny, it helps if you can slooshy Malcolm McDowell govoreeting the story in your gulliver. MM played Alex up on the silver screen, if you've ever viddied that.
If the idea of reading an entire novel written like the paragraph above doesn't seem appealing, then Anthony Burgess' dystopian masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, is not the book for you. Re-read George Orwell's "1984" instead. In Orwell's book, a form of communication called Newspeak is mentioned, with an appendix included to explain it, but Newspeak doesn't dominate the narrative. In A Clockwork Orange, nadsat - a mixture of bastardized Russian and other slang - is deeply embedded in the story and crucial to the whole experience. Most of the lingo can be figured out in context, and for the rest, there are nadsat translators now available on the web.
The book opens with Alex - a juvenile delinquent to the extreme - lovingly describing his favorite pastimes: reckless driving, breaking and entering, assault and rape. When an ugly struggle for the position of alpha male leaves his gang of friends bitter, Alex is betrayed and abandoned at the scene of a particularly nasty crime. Two years of imprisonment do little to curb his natural tendencies (he's observed reading the Bible often, but he secretly gets off on the violence in the Good Book) so he's enrolled in a new treatment program to "rehabilitate" him. Alex is reconditioned so that he is incapable of violent or lustful thoughts - or, more accurately, unable to act out such impulses: whenever he feels aggression, he's incapacitated by intense nausea. His rehabilitation deemed a complete success, Alex is released again into society, where he has the misfortune to cross paths with the people he had wronged before his arrest.
Burgess' novel - the one for which he is best known - is a satirical look at a near future where the ever-increasing violence among young people has reached a fever pitch and the debate over punishment versus treatment of criminals rages on. There's no doubt that Alex is a menace, and yet Burgess offers no easy answers. Time behind bars does nothing for the young man, but the flaws of his treatment are fully exposed, demonstrating that there's no magic bullet to cure criminal behavior. He becomes a puppet in a war of politics, and when Alex is released after "rehabilitation" - weak, defenseless - readers will likely view him as a helpless victim rather than a dangerous criminal getting what he deserves.
A Clockwork Orange is an icon in genre fiction, and the source material for Stanley Kubrick's controversial film. Any speculative fiction fan who hasn't read the novel (if such a person exists) should do so immediately.
If the idea of reading an entire novel written like the paragraph above doesn't seem appealing, then Anthony Burgess' dystopian masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange, is not the book for you. Re-read George Orwell's "1984" instead. In Orwell's book, a form of communication called Newspeak is mentioned, with an appendix included to explain it, but Newspeak doesn't dominate the narrative. In A Clockwork Orange, nadsat - a mixture of bastardized Russian and other slang - is deeply embedded in the story and crucial to the whole experience. Most of the lingo can be figured out in context, and for the rest, there are nadsat translators now available on the web.
The book opens with Alex - a juvenile delinquent to the extreme - lovingly describing his favorite pastimes: reckless driving, breaking and entering, assault and rape. When an ugly struggle for the position of alpha male leaves his gang of friends bitter, Alex is betrayed and abandoned at the scene of a particularly nasty crime. Two years of imprisonment do little to curb his natural tendencies (he's observed reading the Bible often, but he secretly gets off on the violence in the Good Book) so he's enrolled in a new treatment program to "rehabilitate" him. Alex is reconditioned so that he is incapable of violent or lustful thoughts - or, more accurately, unable to act out such impulses: whenever he feels aggression, he's incapacitated by intense nausea. His rehabilitation deemed a complete success, Alex is released again into society, where he has the misfortune to cross paths with the people he had wronged before his arrest.
Burgess' novel - the one for which he is best known - is a satirical look at a near future where the ever-increasing violence among young people has reached a fever pitch and the debate over punishment versus treatment of criminals rages on. There's no doubt that Alex is a menace, and yet Burgess offers no easy answers. Time behind bars does nothing for the young man, but the flaws of his treatment are fully exposed, demonstrating that there's no magic bullet to cure criminal behavior. He becomes a puppet in a war of politics, and when Alex is released after "rehabilitation" - weak, defenseless - readers will likely view him as a helpless victim rather than a dangerous criminal getting what he deserves.
A Clockwork Orange is an icon in genre fiction, and the source material for Stanley Kubrick's controversial film. Any speculative fiction fan who hasn't read the novel (if such a person exists) should do so immediately.
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