A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (5 stars)

What's it going to be then, eh?

Back in 2008 when I was trying to think of a name for this blog, I decided it should be the first line from one of my favourite books. After some deliberation I settled on this one, a question asked by Alex at the start of each of the three sections of the book, not only because I liked the book, but because it seemed appropriate for a book review blog.

The main reason I love this book is for its ingenious language. Burgess invents a slang language he calls nadsat for his teenage characters that consists of around 200 words, based mostly on Russian:

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 we 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. But, as they say, money isn't everything.

After reading this I feel like govoreeting my horrorshow slovos to my droogs :)

The violence in the book is horrendous, which is the main reason I've never seen Kubrick's film adaptation. Alex's deep, ingrained love of 'the ultra-violence' and the advent of psychological conditioning as a 'cure' lead Burgess to pose the question:

Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Burgess makes it clear that he thinks Alex must be allowed to choose to be good. In the final (21st) chapter, Alex makes a startling turn-around. This chapter has become infamous because it was excluded from the US published version, and Kubrick also elected to leave it out of the film.

Some seem to think the final chapter is a cop out, but I disagree. I think it is a better ending - an enduring lifetime of unending violence seems unlikely for anyone, even a monster like Alex.

5 stars.

Update: I finally got around to giving the movie a viddy, and while it is a faithful adaptation of the book, I just don't think it is anywhere near as good. The crime and the city seemed much less apocalyptic than I imagined from the book, the nadsat slang was toned down, and I felt the whole thing should have just been...darker.