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?

Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”

“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”

This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.

As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)