After talking about it yesterday oh my brothers, I got curious, and your humble narrator checked out the book. Overall, I couldn’t believe how much of the book was fit into the Kubrick movie. It made me respect the movie that much more. To me, it seemed to perfectly communicate the ideas of the book without much loss in translation. Anthony Burgess wrote it in 3 weeks. He originally wrote it with 21 chapters to signify 21 years, the age of an adult, but when trying to get it published in New York the publisher wanted to cut the last chapter. Needing the money, he agreed, and this is the version that the film was based on. Naturally this burned the author’s beans and he thought that this was a huge mistake. Inevitably, this book ended up becoming his most influential as well as his least liked book that he authored.
The next to last chapter of the book concludes with the protagonist (Alex) waking up in a hospital bed after his attempted suicide and the doctors having managed to reverse the Ludovico technique thereby allowing him to have violent fantasies and enjoy classical music again. The last sentence being “I was cured all right”. The chapter that follows is a redemptive chapter. As Alex grows older the destructive tendencies of youth are replaced with creational values and so after having reorganized a group of droogs he just ends up getting bored and wanting to settle down. I 100% agree with the American publisher and Kubrick on this one. That last chapter made no sense to me, and it was a great choice to cut it.
The title Clockwork Orange was a piece of slang that Burgess overheard in a Cockney Bar shortly after WWII which stuck with him. Its original meaning was something like “the ultimate strange” as in “as queer as a clockwork orange”. But Burgess then adds to this the core struggle of novel which is free will vs forced will. Where clockwork represents a mechanism, and orange represents something juicy and sweet. Meaning someone good without choice. There is a quote that gets used a couple of times that sums this up.
“A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.”
Burgess use of language is probably my favorite part of this novel. The slang is mostly adaptations of Russian words, but it seems like he came up with the slang by himself for this novel which is really impressive to do in three weeks. The only thing I was surprised to learn in the book was that the main character (Alex) was 15 when the book starts, in the movie he seemed older. Also, in the book the girls that he picks up in the record shop and takes back to his flat are pre-teens in the book, yikes. This is a great book, that I don’t think you need to read if you’ve seen the movie, but it is definitely entertaining. The main character to me is Satan incarnate. This is because violence in the real world is typically associated with low IQ and lack of culture. This is why the words “civilization” and “education” get bandied about so often as a curative for lower class violence. This character on the other hand is cultured and has a high IQ. These are the most dangerous and rare violent people. Like the story of Satan destroying paradise, there was no real reason for his violence. Worse yet he is charming and charismatic. Burgess complained that the movie glorified violence (which wasn’t an uncommon criticism) but this is partially his fault for having written such a charismatic villain. He is simultaneously sickening and inspirational. He truly does represent William Blake’s conception of Hell as energy. The allure of the dark side is criticized by society, yet it remains, and ignoring it doesn’t lessen its appeal. It may be surprising to hear me call the main character inspirational, but I say this because he lived as if he were a character in a video game. Whenever you put someone in an open world and give them tools to destroy it, they will. This seems to be how he viewed the world. It was a game, one day it was some random homeless guy creeching in a puddle of his own krovvy, and maybe the next day it’d be him. It is also inspirational to see anyone completely sold out on whatever they are doing. Almost anyone who acts without doubt will have followers. Burgess wanted the last chapter to be included as a redemptive element, allowing the character to change and giving a sort of optimistic moral to the story, being that the best change is self-determined, and that creation is better than destruction. Without the last chapter, we are left to grapple with the possibility that some humans may be beyond change. “Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated.”