I was speaking to an audience in England some years ago, when I was asked: “Why are American sports so violent?” To which I mounted a lukewarm defense of the NFL: “Hey, at least our violence is on the field, not in the stands”—a perhaps uncharitable reference to the tradition of soccer hooliganism, which the British have virtually elevated to a lifestyle category.
But I might equally have pointed to serious British fiction. And I’m not talking about trashy supermarket novels, rather highbrow classics. Is there a more disturbingly violent novel than Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory , which The Independent picked as one of the top 100 books of the 20th century? Well, J.G. Ballard’s Crash might qualify, which not only fixates on gore and mutilation, but even aims to poeticize it. It made The Telegraph ’s list of “100 Books Everyone Should Read.” (My addendum . . . but don’t drive a car for the next week.) And when British authors try their hand at a touching coming-of-age story, it comes out like Lord of the Flies or Never Let Me Go .
But then we arrive at the most famous of them all, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange , which took the brutal exploits of nasty punks and transformed them into the main theme for a literary symphony. As late as 1973, a bookdealer in Utah was arrested for selling a copy of this novel. Of course, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation had created controversies of its own by then. It was condemned by the Catholic bishops in the US, and the movie was withdrawn from the UK cinemas soon after release because of allegations that it was spurring copycat crime. For more than a quarter of a century this movie was almost impossible to see in Burgess’s native country.
Even so, far more people have viewed the film than have read Burgess’s potent novel. If you know Kubrick’s version you may be sad (but more likely relieved) to learn that the song “Singin’ in the Rain” does not figure in the book. But there is certainly no shortage of music— and associated violence—to fill the gaps. A more striking difference between film and book is Burgess’s final chapter, omitted from the original American edition and ignored by Kubrick, which tries to redeem his protagonist Alex and send him off to a conventional wife-and-kids-at-home life.
At the start of the novel, Alex is the fifteen-year-old leader of a band of punks who spend their evenings committing random acts of violence in a dystopian setting where crime is rampant and most folks stay indoors at night. Not that Alex and his cronies are above breaking and entering, and beating people to death in their homes. A Clockwork Orange follows Alex’s criminal career, his subsequent arrest and rehabilitation in a high tech brainwashing facility, and finally his attempt to return to society. In the longer book version, Alex decides on his own to embrace the straight and narrow, while the shortened edition leaves the matter ambiguous.
This final episode changes the meaning of the book, but can hardly negate the tone of nihilism in the previous two hundred pages. Oddly enough, Burgess insisted on the later inclusion of the final chapter in US editions, yet also claimed that the pat resolution of the book was its biggest flaw. “The book does also have a moral lesson,” he wrote, “and it is the weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice. It is because this lesson sticks out like a sore thumb that I tend to disparage A Clockwork Orange as a work too didactic to be artistic.”
Now that might have surprised the censors, and even many current readers of the book. Burgess thought his novel was too obvious in advocating traditional morality? Hmmm, I think we should let the readers vote on that. Many would see this book as the quintessential expression of anti-morality or of a Nietzschean will to power.
Burgess once offered a different angle on the book to an interviewer. Talking to a journalist in Malta (where Burgess had moved to avoid 90% marginal tax rates back home), he commented: “We can eradicate any public evil we wish most efficiently if we employ dictatorial methods. The secret of government, as of private morality, is to balance individual freedom of choice with what is considered to be a necessary apparatus of repression. Lead us not into temptation. But it’s only to God that we pray so; it’s not up to the State to keep away the occasions of sin.”
So one can read A Clockwork Orange as a look into the morality of an individual, or as an inquiry into the morality of the State. The latter perspective is easy to overlook in all the throttling, kicking and slashing in these pages, but is there nonetheless. Indeed, the dark sci-fi trappings of the novel make A Clockwork Orange a worthy follower in the British tradition of Orwell and Huxley , who believed that genre fiction could support the weight of sociopolitical discourse.
Yet put aside the “meaning” of A Clockwork Orange for a bit, and just enjoy it for the prose. Burgess is one of the great heirs of James Joyce, and creates a new language to convey his story. You will realize from the opening page that this will not be your conventional narrative: “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being real dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.”
I have elsewhere suggested that conceptual fiction, which plays fast and loose with our conceptions of reality, serves as an alternative to fiction that experiments with words. Yet here Burgess delivers both, and in full measure. This author may have had reservations that he had written a novel that was all too ‘weary’ and ‘traditional’. But I doubt that will be your impression on reading this extraordinary, unsettling book.