A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Or "I Was Going To Write Something About 'Viddying This Real Horrorshow Like Novel' But Every Ninth Grader Has Already Taken That Idea."

A Clockwork Orange goes along with The Handmaid's Tale on my Books Everyone Else Read in High School But Somehow I Missed list. And it goes along with my current dystopian future kick. Also like The Handmaid's Tale. But that's where the Atwood/Burgess similarities end so we'll just focus on Clockwork.

It's impossible to talk about A Clockwork Orange without talking about the language. I can't think of another book I've read where the crafting of the language is so complete and so effective. Burgess's entirely new slang (a little bit Cockney, a little bit Russian, a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n roll) not only brings to life this ultra-violent future Britain, but it also serves to distance us - and, in essence, desensitize us - to that ultra-violence. It was astonishing, vivid, and at times disarmingly funny.

I'm assuming that most of you have read this book or at least seen the movie (I'd seen the movie first, and really admire the adaptation), so I won't dwell too much on plot. I will, however, spend a moment responding to ol' Burgess's introduction. Perhaps you are familiar with it. To summarize, Burgess hates the movie, resents that Clockwork is his most famous novel, and is mad at the American publishers for publishing it without it's final chapter. The publisher briefly responds, saying that in this edition the final chapter has been restored, so American audiences can read it the way Burgess intended. The publisher also writes (and I love this) that "the author and his American publisher...differ in their memories as to whether or not the dropping of the last chapter, which changed the book's impact dramatically, was a condition of publishing or merely a suggestion made for conceptual reasons." After reading Clockwork, I tend to prefer the American publisher's way, omitting the last chapter. Sorry, Anthony.