Book review
Tricky to review such a famous book, one I’ve been avoiding for years due to my issues with the violence. I really liked it (the book, that is), and it has kept my head buzzing with questions all this week.
Burgess describes a world in which violence is structural and endemic: Alex and his droogs (gang members) are only unauthorised exponents of violence. Burgess progressively shows the state, police, prison services, Christian Bible, medical establishment, opposition parties and media – and even the victims of criminal violence – all to be equally prone to violence. It’s brilliant satire, reminiscent of Ben Jonson’s Jacobean dark comedies.
What makes a book famous? Burgess had superb timing, coming in at the beginning of a decade of anti-establishment rebellion and of taboo and convention busting – the ‘youth quake’. Clockwork Orange does for violence what Lady Chattlerley’s Lover – finally published in England around the same time – did for sex. It also buddies up with Nabokov’s almost contemporary Pale Fire for linguistic and formal experimentation.
It was supremely clever to make up a language for his hooligans to speak; this is the greatest success of the book. One initially struggles to learn their demotic blend of King James bible, Romany, Polari, Russian and Jacobean tragedy (Nadsat) – but this learning process makes one a member of the gang – you are sympathetic, an initiate and therefore implicated. The invented language is remarkably energetic and amusing – it clearly shouts ‘this is all an artifice’ whilst simultaneously freeing Burgess to ramp the violence to the max (and paradoxically distancing it). It’s quite a feat to make such an appalling villain as Alex such an appealing character, whilst speaking a densely contrived language. Inventing Nadsat also allowed Burgess to reference the contemporary Teddy Boys and the Mods without losing credibility by getting details wrong.
Clockwork Orange also benefited from its subsequent history – the Stanley Kubrick film, with a controversial history of its own, the Penguin paperback with the iconic Pop Art cover, and the various fights that erupted around Burgess’s subsequent public pronouncements (He called the Kubrick film ‘Clockwork Marmalade’).
I was thrilled to discover that Clockwork Orange is one of that select band of English masterpieces with two alternative endings (in this case unplanned and accidental). Burgess later complained his American publisher demanded he cut the final chapter (21) as it was too sentimental for their market. Pressed for cash and needing the advance money, Burgess agreed but subsequently changed his mind. The film and the Penguin paperback followed the American edition.
Chapter 20 ends with a killer last sentence and ends the narrative tightly. Thematically, narratively, symbolically the book is a perfect albeit limited whole. Chapter 21 opens up a whole can of worms, which to me makes the book far more open and thought provoking.
Kubrick said he was completely unaware of Chapter 21 when he made the film; Penguin of course followed the film when issuing the tie-in paperback. The American publishers wrote to the TLS to dispute Burgess’s claims: they admitted suggesting the cut, but (they said) Burgess accepted enthusiastically and told them Chapter 21 was only written at his British publisher’s insistence.
W. Heinemann seems wisely to have kept their heads down and didn’t comment. (The UK hardback first edition also has a classic design. Cheapest copy on Abe currently at £500).
I struggle to believe any side of the argument. It doesn’t seem credible that Americans are militantly less sentimental than the British; and in any case if sentimentality was a literary crime then no one would read Dickens. Burgess in later years claimed chapter 21 was necessary because his whole book was about Catholic free will, but I grew up Catholic too and have to say no priest would give protagonist Alex absolution. The book almost goes out of its way to assert Alex does not in a Catholic sense repent (in either ending): and to a Catholic repentance, remorse and confession is essential for absolution.
Whatever the answer, it’s pretty perfect we are left with a text that enacts its own central questions: is Alex reformable or not? And how exactly is ‘reform’ defined?
- Goodreads rating – 4.00
- REVIEW – Eddie Clarke