Baddies in books: Alex from A Clockwork Orange

From Charles Dickens to Stephen King, fiction offers plenty of troubled children – but Anthony Burgess’s teenage narrator is in a league of his own

While real-life juvenile delinquency is depressing in the extreme, there is an undeniable frisson generated by the fictional juxtaposition of innocence and evil – of boys and girls gone bad and youths wicked beyond their years. Just think of ruthless 17-year-old gang boss Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, or murderous would-be-übermensch Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or the machiavellian Steerpike wending his way through Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels; then there’s the legions of troubled children who populate the literary landscapes of Charles Dickens, William Trevor and Stephen King. But when it comes to pure evil – evil as a force of nature – Alex, the 15-year-old narrator of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, is in a league of his own.

First and foremost there is the language. A Clockwork Orange is a reading experience unlike any other. Set in a dystopian future England, the novel is narrated in Nadsat, Burgess’s brilliantly conceived argot, made up partly of bastardised Russian. An initial response at being plunged into Alex’s world is likely to be one of bewilderment and alienation: “We sat in the Korova Milk Bar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.” But Alex’s tone is amiable. He addresses his readers directly, looking for friendship and understanding. (“You may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days.”) As one is swept up by the rhythm of the narrative, and by the sheer inventiveness and lyricism of the language, one gradually begins to see the world through Alex’s eyes – only to be pulled up short when realising the descriptions are of acts of terrible violence.

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