A Clockwork Orange in Easley Library Bookworms

Mar 20, 2008 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science-fiction

My rating for this book doesn't reflect the degree to which I "enjoyed" or "liked" it, as such; as I once said to an English professor friend of mine at the college where I work, I think there are books which, because of their dark subject matter, you don't read for pleasure in the way you would more upbeat books, but which still give you enlightenment into the human moral, spiritual and social condition in ways that are well worth having. The authors didn't mean for you to "enjoy" these works. My rating for this book doesn't reflect the degree to which I "enjoyed" or "liked" it, as such; as I once said to an English professor friend of mine at the college where I work, I think there are books which, because of their dark subject matter, you don't read for pleasure in the way you would more upbeat books, but which still give you enlightenment into the human moral, spiritual and social condition in ways that are well worth having. The authors didn't mean for you to "enjoy" these works. At the time, we were discussing Conrad's Heart of Darkness; but I think this book is another good example of that type of literature. It earns its five stars on the strength of the seriousness and worth of the author's ideas, the clarity and effectiveness with which they're presented --and in this case, in no small measure, the amount of technical writing skill displayed here.

Burgess' setting here is a near-future (from the 1962 perspective) England in a state of social and moral decadence, largely under Russian political domination, and terrorized by gangs of teenage thugs. One of the latter, Alex, a sadistic and violence-prone rapist, serves as both narrator and protagonist. From the perspective of morally-minded readers, this premise obviously doesn't sound promising; we're apt to assume that Burgess approves of this behavior, or wants to use it to shock or titillate the readers (or both). Actually, he does neither. In fact, the book has no directly described sex or violence (so much for the titillation factor :-)). What it does have is serious reflection, through the lens of fictional events, on questions of human moral responsibility and free will.

The dominant ideology of Western society's cultural/political elites in 1962 --and today as well-- was and is determinism: the idea that human beings are volitionless puppets of social, psychological and ultimately chemical forces which predetermine their every thought and action. There is, in this view, no dimension of moral choice in behavior; no guilt in being bad (or "anti-social") and no virtue in being good (or "pro-social"). And if given individuals behave in ways that "society" doesn't approve, then if society has the power (quaint notions of the "right" don't enter into this thinking at all) to eliminate that behavior by re-engineering those individual's minds to suit itself, it's a no-brainer that it should. That, of course, isn't a science fiction premise --it's a simple description of the belief system of our present-day political/academic/scientific Establishment. What the latter lacks in real life, however, is a technology or technique that they're 100% sure will do the re-engineering to perfection. In the dystopian vision of this book, however, England's rulers think they've found an aversive conditioning brainwashing technique that will do just that --and Alex gets to be the test case.

Burgess' own views are clearly diametrically opposed to this whole determinist consensus; he doesn't believe its premises on any level, and he does a very good job of demolishing them here. (Though not a Christian, his perspective was clearly informed by the Christian tradition, as well as other strands of historical Western democratic and humanistic philosophical tradition that are out of favor today.) That alone would get him high marks from me. But he also shows enormous technical virtuosity in his prose; he created an entire new English dialect, Nadsat, a Russian-influenced argot spoken by the teen gangs. Alex's narrative voice is entirely spoken in this dialect; it's initially challenging to understand (the original British edition that I read doesn't have a glossary; I don't know if this one does or not), but it proves to be a perfect medium for the story he tells, with lyric and communicative possibilities all its own. The development of this language, and the consistent way Burgess uses it, was a literary achievement of a very high order, IMO.

As the Goodreads description above notes, this is the first American edition to include all 21 chapters of the book. As Burgess notes in his introduction, his first American publishers essentially forced him to let them delete the last chapter (which, of course, had already been included in the British, original, edition). It's impossible to fully describe the differences without writing spoilers; but it would suffice to say that the mutilation drastically distorts the author's intended effect and message, and makes that edition, in his words, "badly flawed." (The film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, interestingly, was based on the mutilated edition, which was the only one he had read at the time he conceived the project.) ...more

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Mar 04, 2014 Crystal rated it did not like it

While this book offers a picture into a certain mentality or world, I can not say anything other than I did not like this book and my stomach turns when I think about the main character.

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Dec 01, 2010 Ryan Moore rated it really liked it

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Mar 25, 2013 Emily Sears Cook marked it as to-read

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