Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange

book review by

James Krendel-Clark

Numerical rating: 10/10 (classic)

First off, oh my brothers, the book is better than the film. It's not really a question of the redemptive ending but of the writing. There is about four times as much wordplay in it as in Kubrick's rendition, and it does a great deal to advance the plot (which is immaculate, following, like, all of the Aristotelian symmetries and whatnot). This is a book that you can cream into like so much freshly whipped butter. As Burgess says, the slang muffled the violence, rendering the "red red kroovy" (gushing blood) into a kind of groovy jargon that eats away at the morality of the reader since it doesn't come across as pornographic or ruthless. Few books have I enjoyed so much as this one. I ordered it on a whim, and when it arrived at my doorstep, I felt confused, like someone else had ordered it for me, but I checked, and no, I ordered it for myself, apparently along with some books on eugenics. I remembered ordering the eugenics books though. At any rate, one does not find it particularly ridiculous to relate to the protagonist, who grins his way through a real rough shredding like real horrorshow ultraviolence and prison religion and government mind control, and while it clearly weighed on Burgess's conscience that he'd written something so indulgent and prurient, and especially that the final chapter had been sliced off of the American version and therefore Kubrick's versions as well, so that instead of "growing up", we're left with an unreformed scoundrel. The resonances, highlighted nicely by Kubrick's version, with Nazism are obvious (orgiastic classical music frothing up to some horrorshow ultraviolence with lots of red kroovy flowing), and Alex is a "bland fanatic", and even in the original version with the final chapter restored we don't find Alex to be repentant exactly, but simply concerned about wasting his life on violence and drugs and gangsterism. Rarely have I encountered so horrorshow a melding of language and narrative, and this is precisely what makes the book great. Anyone with an admiration for the excesses of the avant garde will nevertheless find this to be a rather disciplined and formally euphonic little bit of orchestral experimentation, less Ludwig Van than, in fact, Berg or Webern. A tight little juicy vesch it is. Ten out of ten, my brothers.