The Book Tower

‘It’s a book,’ I said. ‘It’s a book what you are writing.’ I made the old goloss very coarse. ‘I have always had the strongest admiration for them as can write books.’ Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: ‘That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’ Then I read the malenky bit out loud in a sort of a very high type preaching glooss: ‘- The attempt to impose upon man, a creaure of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen – ‘ Dim made the old lip-music at that and I had to smeck myself. Then I started to tear up the sheets and scatter the bits over the floor…

Alex is fifteen. He lives with his parents, goes to school and has a fondness for Beethoven. He’s also the leader of a violent gang, partaking in mugging, housebreaking and assault. A Clockwork Orange is set in an unnamed city in the future (probably London, but also possibly East European) where Alex and his Droogs prowl the streets, drink milk spiked with drugs and talk in their own unique slang. Alex’s thuggish exploits are thankfully shortlived; he is arrested, sent to prison and eventually subjected to some revolutionary, and extreme, techniques to cure his evil and make him good. Drugged and physically restrained, he is forced to watch violent films which make any form of physical violence sickening to him. Two years after his arrest he is released back into society as an apparent model citizen. He is promptly beaten up by two of his old associates (now policemen), set upon by various former victims and attempts suicide. Whilst in hospital he discovers that the curing techniques have been reversed, and leaves ‘cured again’ to form another street gang. His heart isn’t in it this time however as, now aged 18, he feels he has grown out of it all.

I’ve rewritten this post several times as I’ve tried to make sense of A Clockwork Orange. I still haven’t – the novel is entertaining, disturbing and thought provoking as Anthony Burgess intended, but it’s also repetitive, unconvincing and tiresome. My problem was that I didn’t care what happened to Alex, and I failed to respond to the danger to society he posed, or that posed by his own tormentors. Reading it I kept thinking of Malcolm McDowell and Stanley Kubrick. The film, although not one of the director’s best, does outshine the book.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film version provoked some apparent copycat behaviour of the violence in the novel and this prompted the director to withdraw the film from circulation. It didn’t resurface in the UK until after his death in 1999. Until then, I had only seen A Clockwork Orange on a very well worn VHS sometime in the 1980s. Going to see the film in London when it was reissued, I was so excited that I accidently bought four tickets instead of two (excited as a Kubrick obsessive rather than a Burgess fan I confess). I also recall a group of teenage boys hanging around outside, plotting ways to bunk into the cinema in the spirit of Alex and his Droogs. I can’t remember whether they made it inside or not.

Ultimately, both book and film have been too overshadowed by controversy to deliver a punch any more; ironically a controversy that Kubrick sought to avoid. Going to see the film all those years ago was a disappointment because I’d heard so much and expected so much, now I’ve finally got round to reading the book I have the same deflated feeling – only more so. Crime and punishment in a futuristic although strangely familiar future? I’m sticking with Orwell.