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A Clockwork Orange

W. W. Norton & Company

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Average customer rating: 4.5 stars

Tickity Tickity Tock Drones The Giant Clock

Young Alex boy is caught inbetween the ol tick tock. Mechanical action on either side. Thankfully we have Free Will to decide who's doing the ticking and who's doing the tocking. Right? Mr. Burgess records many measures in this short piece having the instruments mainly composed of - the good the bad and the fugly.

This is altogether one of those moral-philosophical novels. Detailing the rhythm of growing up to the old age of 18 and all the young and dumb decisions we make during. It's a lasting story for all the parts and concise tuning of telling this often told tale because of the satire, politicking weight of government, conditioning, religion, art, etc. that's subtly or subliminally employed that can be impactful in 2010 or 0102.

Some issues that are raised have long been sought to be answered or in the least rightly asked and questioned. It's interesting that Your Humble Narrator Alex makes his way like cause and effect back to his causes and now effected with the violence that he first caused. Many recurring scenarios. Some fulfilled some not. There's a hints that what takes place in the linear time of a few years was much longer. This youth lived through many lifetimes in one short spell of time. He experiences the old what goes around comes around.

I applaud! this sweet taste of language! this troubling look at our robotic, egotistical nature! and hope that at some time our Alarm sounds! and rings! to the sublime and divine harmony of Ludwig von! and we wake up to the dawn! to prepare for the dusk!

Great Smecks

Highly entertaining. Infinitely better than the movie. It has some political viewpoints related to government interference into the lives of citizens for 'the better good'. Tis better to live in hell than to be chained in heaven. Only thing I didn't like was no annotation on the made up language which became tiresome after a bit.

Disturbing but Awesome!!

Not for the faint of heart, yet this has to be considered one of the all time greats for the style in which it is written. I've never read anything else like it. This one will definitely stick with you.

The colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the page

To say that A Clockwork Orange is a "controversial" piece of media is an understatement: militant feminists and "family values" activists have gone so far as to remove this book from library shelves. It has been hailed as genius satire and denounced as violent exploitation. Some read it as Burgess's own depraved rape fantasies. Other people will argue that it's an attempt to get into the heads of the young men who gang-raped his pregnant wife. Others read it as a piece of chaotic, post-modern art to be appreciated by the edgy and the hip.
A Clockwork Orange may be all of those things and more. What it is most of all, however, is an amazing, sweeping, page-turning read.
Burgess takes the reader inside the mind of Alex, the leader of a small youth gang, all of whom enjoy nothing more than imbibing mind-altering substances, giving women a bit of the old in and out (whether they like it or not) and beating up the poor. This all changes, however, when Alex is arrested and given the chance to participate in an experiment to cure his sociopathy and turn him into a fine, upstanding member of society.
While Alex's violence and the moral quandary posed by the experiment form part of the sick, prurient excitement of the book, none of it would work nearly as well without Alex's cynical and humorous tongue-in-cheek narration, told in a fictional Slavic-inspired slang language that may be difficult to comprehend the first few pages, but soon becomes readily clear.
With Alex, Burgess takes the anti in anti-hero to new levels, to the point where he can barely be called a hero if not for the fact that his observations and asides are strangely and hilariously charming.

A radical world, great story, and strong moral lesson makes this a classic

Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange paints a horrifying, grim, dystopian future. Your Humble Narrator - or, Alex - and his three droogs spend their evenings and nights beating, raping, torturing and stealing from any person unlucky enough to be in Alex's path. One evening, however, the gang turns on Alex and he is set-up, with the police arriving just as he murdered an old woman in her house.

Off to jail he goes, having to serve over a decade in a prison over-stuffed, with six or more people sharing a cell designed for two or three prisoners at most. Alex, however, is given the choice to take part in a new program that will get him out of the prison in two weeks, and back to the outside world to live his life as he sees fit. This new program, however, is not something Alex expected; Alex was tied to a chair, with his eyes taped open and forced to watch horrible acts of violence and murder - acts all-too familiar and enjoyable to Alex - as an injected chemical makes him feel nauseous and sick. After two weeks of this treatment, Alex would feel sick at the mere thought of violent acts.

The treatment worked, and Alex's life became a living nightmare, as his former friends were now police officers and old victims were able to exact their vengeance upon Alex. A failed attempt at suicide left Alex in the hospital - cured of Ludovic's experiment - and a return to the life of violence and crime he once knew.

So ends the previously published American version, short one chapter that had been published in the UK. Burgess claims the American publisher made the decision to leave out the final chapter while the publisher claims it was "merely a suggestion made for conceptual reasons." Regardless, the American version misses a chapter that is vital to the message: the power of choice.

One of the characters - the prison chaplain - asks the questions, "Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?" Through the experimental punishment to rid Alex of his evil ways, he no longer had a choice in his actions. This brings a moral dilemma, discussed by a panel after Alex has completed his punishment. "He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice," argued one person, but the general consensus was that, "We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime...and with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons." This moral dilemma, the ability to choose right or wrong, good or evil, is the message of Burgess' work. The final chapter completes the story and how Alex chooses and acknowledges this moral choice.

A Clockwork Orange is written in a peculiar way - the entire book uses the nadsat language created by Burgess. Not so much a language, rather heavy slang influenced by Slavic languages, the use of nadsat creates a unique world the reader becomes entranced in. It also helps to alleviate the gruesome nature of Alex and his friends, putting more focus on the message rather than the brutal acts of violence. While some may be put off by the confusing language at first, Burgess does an excellent job introducing it and using each new word in context easy to understand and grasp, and before long the reader will be reading at his/her normal pace.