A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The story of how this novel came to be written is very nearly as interesting as the book itself. Following a collapse in a classroom where he taught in Southeast Asia's Brunei in 1959, Anthony Burgess was (mistakenly) diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and told he had less than a year to live. He was 42 and worried how his wife would survive after he was gone. As a result, he churned out some five novels within the year and 11 by 1964, including A Clockwork Orange, The Doctor Is Sick, Honey for the Bears, Inside Mr. Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, One Hand Clapping, and The Wanting Seed. It's thus little surprise that A Clockwork Orange feels like a rush job, often reminiscent of some of Philip K. Dick's novels produced under similar pressures. As much as anything it's saved by two factors: Burgess's training as a linguist enabled him to concoct a flamboyant argot that thoroughly permeates the action (a glossary of this so-called Nadsat was published in earlier editions and is now found easily online; it's essential to understanding the book, though contextual clues are plentiful). Much of Nadsat is based on adaptations of Russian, which makes this more or less de facto a post-apocalyptic Cold War novel as much as anything. Perhaps most significantly, the fate of the work was sealed when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick took it on as a project. Burgess complained loudly and often that the picture distorted the novel unconscionably, particularly in following the American publishers' lead of lopping off the last chapter entirely, but the film seems to me actually remarkably faithful to the novel. Or maybe that's some artifact for me of the indelible aspects of the picture, notably Malcolm McDowell's performance, which rings loudly all through this in dialogue lifted straight off. Even little throwaway lines such as "What didst thou in thy mind have?" recall the picture for me vividly. I loved the movie when I was in high school—perhaps for the wrong reasons, the cartoony verve with which it relished its brutality, "the old ultra-violence"—and was suitably impressed when I read the novel then. Now I think it's still an interesting book, and think of it still for adolescents, though I suspect it's way more marginalized in this day and age. I think the dense slang is what makes it useful, more for the way it forces appreciation for language and its sources than for the moral/ethical conundrum that the narrative pretends to address of the "clockwork orange"—a thing manufactured but with the appearance of the organic—which gets a bit simplistic and overly dependent on I-R-O-N-Y to makes its heavy-handed points about freedom and social conditioning.

In case it's not at the library.