Review by Edward Tanguay January 26, 1996

You've sinned, I suppose, but your punishment has been out of all proportion. They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good.

This book has a nice beginning. The new vocabulary puts you in a new world. The repetition of "What's it going to be then, eh?" is very provocative, as in a fight, which prepares you for the raw violence that follows.

And soon you are reading descriptions of the most violent acts ("so we had her down on the floor and a rip of her platties for fun and a gentle bit of the boot to stop her moaning") and the juvenile enjoyment of it leaves you without response ("then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful"). All of this in the first chapter made it a wonderful start to a novel. The reader is shocked and upset and wants some kind of explanation, wants to see the reasons for this violence (like when you are channel surfing late at night and come upon a violent scene that makes you watch the rest of the movie). You wait for Alex or some of his friends to show some kind of repugnance towards the violence they are committing, but they do not. It is all out violence with no moral significance attached. Just like children who torture and kill a bug with a stick, these droogs prance around at night performing their ultra-violence on people with knives, clubs and boots. And all this in the first chapter!

The second chapter is no less disgusting ("Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song or vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on our way.") Then this horrible violence is connected to classical music. Alex goes home, puts on an album of Beethoven and envisions the beautiful violence that he engaged in that night to the sounds of the symphony. The connection of otherwise opposed themes gives the reader the feeling of being conditioned, just as Alex is later. (Why shouldn't Beethoven's 9th not bring up images of violence? Is it just a matter of association?) Alex can listen to a Beethoven and Bach piece and visions of ultra-violence dance in his head. Here he is listening to Bach reading in the Bible about Jesus being led to the cross:

So I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns and then the cross veshch and all that cal, and I viddied better that there was something in it. While the stereo played bits of lovely Bach I closed my glazzies and viddied myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in a like toga that was the heighth of Roman fashion.

The language mixture of nadsat slang and "thee" and "thou" is another example of bringing opposed themes together in this book. We usually associate thee and thou with Shakespeare and the Bible, which gives Alex a unique future-world flavor to his character:

"Yarbles," I said, like snarling like a doggie. "Bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine."

You have to enjoy the language in this book on the whole. Maybe Alex is where Bill-and-Ted learned to talk:

O most beautiful and beauteous of devotschkas, I throw my heart at your feet for you to like trample all over. If I had a rose I would give it to you. If it was all rainy and cally now on the ground you could have my platties to walk on so as not to cover your dainty nogas with filth and cal.

The chaplain was a significant character. He was a type of clown in that he is constantly drunk and runs his church service like an army ("The prisoners sort of howled and wept these stupid slovos with the charlie like whipping them on with 'Louder, damn you, sing up!'") but he also sees the seriousness of Alex's retraining program and in warning Alex, exposes the central issue of the book:

It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? 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?

The three women in the bar who covered up their violence just to get free drinks seem to represent the average citizen gone bad who puts his individual desires before what is right and wrong. There are like a chorus, regularly chanting out:

"Evening, lads, God bless you, boys, best lads living, that's what you are!

This was a new kind of book.  I can't say I've read another like it. It is a great book in the sense that it gives us two bad alternatives: violent youth and inappropriate punishment. The book can therefore set off a long discussion of where to draw the line. How much freedom should a prisoner have? What do you do with someone who is incorrigibly bad? Why not take his choice away so he always does good? What would be the ramifications of this? Burgess gives us two bad alternatives so that we can come up with a good one:

"Violence makes violence" . . . "if all you bastards are on the side of the Good then I'm glad I belong to the other shop."

Of course, this reading of the book only applies to the American edition with only 20 chapters. The book I read was the one printed in England which has 21 chapters. In the 21st chapter, Alex uses his moral choice to change his life for the better. This "missing chapter" in the American edition changes the novel completely. In an introdcution to my edition, Burgess refers to this:

The twenty-first chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change . . . The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel . . . My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it.

The fact that there are two versions of this book gives this book an added dimension. They are two different stories: one is a hard-core, no-hope, futuristic violent world of an oppresive violent state vs. a violent youth--a bleek look at a futuristic world. The other is a story about a hard-core, violent young man who at the end shows the signs of burgeoning moral choice--a touching novel.

Either way you read it, this is a real horrorshow book.

Edward Tanguay

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