Seathrun O’H-airt
In 1971 filmmaker Stanley Kubrick directed a masterpiece of American cinema; A Clockwork Orange. With Malcolm McDowell playing the part of Alex, a teenage hooligan, Kubrick depicted a dystopian future where anarchists and Alex danced through the streets without resistance, carrying out their own selfish and violent rebellions.
Alex and his droogs
The movie opened to great commercial and critical acclaim and has gone down as one of the greatest films of all time. The novel was written almost a decade previously and what surprises me is how few people have actually read it.
The book is better than the film. And I don’t want to be that guy. In fact, I hate that guy. I can’t stand the English-studies pedant wearing tweed and smoking a cheroot telling you that you have to read “this and that” because “cinema is actually an industry subjective to business-suit, fat-cats and their manipulative ways in trying to rope in as many customers as possible by sacrificing intellectualism and art.” No. That’s not me. I liked Inception.
And yet I’m sorry; but A Clockwork Orange, the book, is a sublime piece of work. Its relevance is inarguable in the modern age (what with student rioting and “raging against the system”) concerning our free will and what can occur as a result of this.
Back in 1962, Anthony Burgess wrote the novel which defined him. Clockwork Orange is a meditation on individual freedoms and society’s willingness to swallow it up and the rise of mass popular culture in the 1960’s which brought a new rebellious conformism. However it said to have been initially inspired by events in the author’s life that involved his wife being attacked American GI deserters and her subsequent miscarriage.
The story is narrated by the protagonist, Alex, in Nadsat. It is a fictional language that derives words from Cockney-rhyming slang, Russian, German and a variety of other cultures and countries (Burgess himself being a linguist). The author knew well that modes of speech constantly changed so to counter this, his narrator used the language throughout to produce a certain timeless effect. At times this can make it a little frustrating to understand (more specifically towards the start), yet you’d be surprised how quick you get the gist of it.
Anthony Burgess, the acclaimed novelist
It is a difficult book to sell, as its main characters will steal, rape and murder anything and everything that stands in their way to have a good time. In fact, what’s more worrying is that often it is within the process of executing these deeds, are where they derive their most sadistic pleasures. The main characters do not even possess that same indifference as Meursault, in The Stranger, or Clay, in Less than Zero, and therefore the more horrific scenes in Clockwork Orange catch you off guard, and are incredibly visceral and disturbingly emotional, even by today’s standards.
It must be stressed that it is not simply a polemic but a visionary tale of how free will can cause terrible suffering and how easily authority can break this exclusively human gift.
