WELL, Anthony Burgess, we got off to a rocky start but in the end the headache I got trying to decipher Nadsat for the first 40 pages paid off! I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with such a drastic turnaround, where I felt active dislike and annoyance to begin with but then found myself more and more absorbed until finally I was loving it. A bizarre but rewarding reading experience!
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For those of you who don’t know, A Clockwork Orange takes place in a dystopian future, probably the UK but it’s not really clear, where after sundown the streets are ran by gangs of youths whose favourite pastimes include savagely beating elderly people, rape, and generally terrorising the population, under the ominous term ‘ultraviolence’. No sugarcoating it, it’s not an easy read, and what sometimes makes it worse is that the Nadsat slang distances you from the horrific violence you’re reading about, and it’s not until you’ve processed the language that it hits you what it is Burgess is detailing with full force. That delay makes it all the worse.
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The book is divided into three parts: before, during and after the main character Alex’s arrest, and my favourite parts were the second and third, not least because I was used to the jargon by this point. Alex is imprisoned and subject to the Ludovico technique, which takes away his free will in a seemingly ideal way to moderate violence on the streets. The third part examines the consequences of this ‘treatment’, and questioning whether someone can be ‘good’ merely because they’ve had the ‘bad’ stripped away from them.
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I think if you have the patience to get to grips with the slang Burgess makes up, then A Clockwork Orange is more than worth your time, and I’m certainly glad I powered through and finally read this darkly comic and grim little novel!