Books We Can’t Quit – A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Chosen by: Kenny Mooney

A Clockwork Orange is, after Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, one of the most important novels I have ever read. And that is as much to do with what it led me on to read, as it is for anything I took from the novel itself. Along with Burroughs, Burgess’ slim novel showed me what it was possible to do with language and style, and more importantly, how that use of language and style could be in service of the story, rather than for its own sake. The fact that A Clockwork Orange has stayed with me for so long, is testament to the power of its prose, and the impact that Burgess’ invented language, Nadsat, had on me.

And it is not just the language of the novel that is important, it is also its structure. Told in three parts, each seven chapters long, the whole book represents the path from immaturity to maturity, traditionally reached at age 21. The final chapter, one of the most important parts of the novel, and indeed of Burgess’ own philosophy which is central to the story, is the very part that is missing from Kubrick’s film adaptation. And the reason I have never watched it.

It was the prose in A Clockwork Orange that first drew me in, I was in awe of those acrobatic, musical, at times percussive, passages:

“Then I woke up real skorry, my heart going bap bap bap, and of course there was really a bell going brrrrr, and it was our front-door bell. I let on that nobody was at home, but this brrrrr still ittied on, and then I heard a goloss shouting through the door: ‘Come on then, get out of it, I know you’re in bed.’“

You can open up the book at any page and read a passage as beautiful and vibrant as that. It is the lives and language of the characters. It is their swagger and their violence. But admiring it purely for the prose is almost superficial, because the writing is a skin that covers a far more substantial thematic beast.

One of the central themes of the novel is the concept of ‘brainwashing’. As a liberal, Burgess was horrified by the idea of the State seeking to ‘cure’ people of their violent tendencies. What he managed to do brilliantly, was to examine a political philosophy with none of the occasionally clumsy referencing of Orwell’s fiction (Homage to Catalonia is a far better discussion of his politics). While I may have problems with liberalism as a philosophy, the social libertarianism within A Clockwork Orange is something that greatly appealed to me then, and remains relevant to me now. Indeed, the novel manages to remain as relevant as 1984 or Animal Farm, but feels less dated, less like a product of Cold War arguments. It does not feel like a political or philosophical novel in the way those books do, or that Sartre’s Nausea does.

The theme of ‘brainwashing’ goes beyond the story, however, and into the very language of the novel. Our protagonist, Alex, is arrested for murder and put into a ‘behavioral modification’ programme, to condition him to feel sick when confronted by violence. The slang the characters use, Nadsat, a mixture of Russian words and Cockney rhyming slang, serves not only as the vernacular of a youth subculture, but also as a kind of ‘word virus’. Due to its constant use by the characters, you quickly become accustomed to reading it, you stop referring to guides or the introduction for a translation. You get infected. I even found myself using bits in everyday conversations. In short, I was being ‘brainwashed’ by the novel. I continue to use the phrase ‘oddy-knocky’ to this day.

This style-serving-story is what later led me to defend Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from being dismissed by friends who thought it was just meaningless gibberish. Burgess, a linguist and Joyce adherent, wrote many critical analyses of Joyce’s work, and so it is no surprise to find parallels between his use of language in A Clockwork Orange, and Joyce’s in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I may not always understand Joyce’s later writings, but thanks to Burgess I understand why he wrote like that. Which is not to say that I think style should serve story all the time, but through Burgess I saw how it can be used to unite language and story to create a novel that does more than tell a tale. Some get into your brain and change you forever.

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Kenny Mooney is a writer and musician living in Glasgow, Scotland. He blogs at www.dragline.co.uk.

Have a book that you just can’t quit? Send me a note! amye@pankmagazine [dot] com