Reading a novel that was the source material for one of your favorite films is always an interesting and potentially disappointing endeavor. So far my biggest let down in that department was Fight Club, the 1996 book written by Chuck Palahniuk. It wasn’t so much Palahniuk’s fault, as it was film director David Fincher’s incredible success. Fincher took a bizarre, disjointed novel and turned it into a brilliantly cohesive work. Palahniuk can still be credited with the themes, ideas, and characters, of course — and the author far surpassed that work about a decade later with Choke.

Still, I wanted to take the same chance with A Clockwork Orange, written by British author Anthony Burgess. I had a feeling that it would be an important book. But when I bought a copy of Orange, I was unaware of the minor controversy behind Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film version. Apparently, when the book was first printed in the U.S. in 1962, the publisher had requested that the 21st chapter be omitted from the novel. It’s not the type of story that can be ruined with spoiler discussions, but I’ll try to be brief. The story regards a teenage boy named Alex, who commits violent crimes for fun, is imprisoned, volunteers for a new “curative” technique, then is released two years after the initial crime.

The problem is that the new technique hasn’t really cured him; it only creates an adverse physiological response to violence and sex. In other words, those stimuli now render Alex immobile and make him feel like he’s going to vomit. The government’s primary goal is to clear the streets of crime and criminals, while also relieving overcrowded prisons, but certain individuals express humanitarian concerns. An author character who finds the new Alex says:

“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. [...] A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man” (pp. 174-175).

One key difference between the book and the film is that the title A Clockwork Orange is actually the name of a work by the author character, and the concept is addressed and explained fairly early. The term is meant to express “the attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, …laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation…” (p. 25).

As the author describes in the introduction to the 1986 edition:

“When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel” (p. xxi).

“The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities” (p. xiii).

One of the novel’s great strengths is the clarity of delivery. The cast is limited and the plot is tight and circular, almost to the point where it could survive as a stage play. It’s so clear that it sheds light on some confusing philosophical topics and questions. Yet it’s philosophical without being one bit preachy. And the reader isn’t given an ideology to accept because, although every character has ideas or suggestions, not one character in the book is really likable. However, Burgess does allow a certain amount of sympathy for Alex, which is strange, since he is essentially a 15-year-old armed robber, rapist, and murderer.

But my favorite thing about the book is the Nadsat dialect, the repertoire of slang that Alex and other teenage “droogs” use to communicate. It’s a twisted combination of Russian and English, and I’m sure that viewing the film version about a dozen times made it easier to understand the terminology while reading. Still, the novel lacks visual cues, vocal intonation, and other helpful hints. As a result, I often felt like I was learning a new language, and boy was it addictive. I could hear the words echoing in my head for days. My favorite line of the whole book might be: “Naughty little malchicks handy with cut-throat britvas—these must be kept under” (p. 167), malchicks meaning punks or just teenagers, and britvas meaning knives. That sentence is delivered by a police officer who used to be Alex’s droog enemy, and it’s a great example of how these fabricated words add vivacity to the story.

After reading the book, I have to agree with the original American publisher that the 21st chapter should have been omitted. In that chapter (when Alex has reached the age of 18), Alex begins to sense that he is growing up, and that maybe he should do something more productive with his life: stop the empty criminal behavior, find a wife, start a family, etc. However, to illustrate that sort of change and not seem contrived, it would have taken about 300 pages—in other words, an entirely different book. Maybe Burgess should have written a sequel to Orange to outline the kind of moral transformation he wanted to see in Alex.

Orange makes many interesting claims, but not one is more powerful than the last scene of Kubrick’s film (the end of the book’s 20th chapter), when Alex imagines having sex in front of a crowd of cheering people, as he exclaims, “I was cured all right.” It’s a profound statement about the immutability of the human animal, an insanely complex being, perhaps bestowed with the power of both good and evil, but with much quicker access to and more prevalent expression of the evil side. That’s one of those confusing philosophical concepts I mentioned before. Are we on an eventual path towards good? Or will our evil side continue to rule until we self-exterminate?

After finishing Steppenwolf, I have to say that it might be the densest 218-page book ever written. Not dense as in unenjoyable, but dense as in containing an incredible amount of useful information and quotable statements. However, thanks to Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider, I had distorted expectations going into Steppenwolf. For some reason I thought it was going to be a story about a man with a hidden dark side who can only vent his frustrations with society by murdering people. I must have mixed up Wilson’s references. But you can see how I was setting myself up for disappointment, hoping for a story that was closer to American Psycho or even A Clockwork Orange. And yet at the end of the book, I was anything but disappointed. Enlightened, envigorated, and inspired — yes, all of those, but not let down.

The story is not easily summarized, since it’s much less plot-based than it is a subjective philosophical exploration. The concise version: Harry Haller is a man of about 50 years who was ejected from both his career and his marriage, and who, after traveling the world and tiring of its banal ways, contemplates killing himself on a daily basis. He recognizes two identities within himself: one, a broken, wretched man with a secret fondness for middle-class regularities; the other, a wolf who would like to tear the whole meaningless mess to shreds. With the help of a book Harry finds called the Treatise on the Steppenwolf and, later on, an intriguing woman named Hermine, he soon learns that there is much more to life — and to himself — than he previously thought.

I underlined and tabbed so many pages that I literally have to limit the amount of quotes I list here. But the section that lit me up the most came approximately 150 pages into the novel.

While Hermine is giving a “lesson” to Harry, she says,

“Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours” (p. 151).

On the next page, Hermine says,

“Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”

“Nothing else?” [asks Harry.]

“Yes, eternity.”

“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity? [...] The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (pp. 152-153).

And a bit later, Hermine continues with:

“We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness” (p. 153).

Later in the story, Harry is still struggling to wrap his head around his new experiences. One of Hermine’s friends says,

“It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all” (p. 175).

And finally, a fun quote about art:

“Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy” (p. 193).

As you can see, I got carried away with the quotations. If any of this grabs you, then you should grab a copy of Steppenwolf immediately. But be forwarned, you will not come out of it with a fuzzy feeling in your rumbly tumbly. You are left with the realization that you alone are responsible to navigate the mess of existence. Like they tell Harry about the Magic Theater: “For Madmen Only!”