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Burgess’s disturbing vision of a dystopian future is told from the viewpoint of a young ‘droog’ Alex. Admittedly, I found Alex’s Nadsat lingo a little getting used to at first but was glad I pursued with the book. Not only does reading unusual narrative challenge the reader, but also casts a different light upon subsequent books.
Book on a Dystopian Future
The story opens with a typical day of Alex and his droog friends, Dim, Georgie and Pete, causing mayhem in the neighborhood via wanton violence, rape and theft. Civilization would appear to be at an end, and the easy targets of his senior citizens mourn the past, when things seemed ‘better.’ One of the reasons for reading this book was to get to the bottom of what A Clockwork Orange meant. It seemed the most disparate pairing of words, as to be surreal. I have never watched the film.
An unfortunate writer finds himself in the destructive path of Alex, of which one of his books was entitled ‘A Clockwork Orange’. But it is only nearer the end of Burgess's tale that we find out the significance of this book. For now, Alex gleefully rips up this poor man’s manuscript to express the value he puts on such objet d'art. The man is distraught and his life is in similar tatters.
Books Similar to Orwell's 1984
After causing the death of an old woman, Alex finds himself the attention of the ‘millicent’ police, who incarcerate him in the Staja, state prison, where he languishes for a number of years. But unrepentant Alex is not to be broken. And here lies the crux of the book, for it is all about mind control, reminiscent of George Orwell’s book 1984. The needs of the many are balanced against the needs of the individual when it came to the state’s concern of subjugating crime beneath the system. And at this point, I began to wonder if Burgess had chosen this Nadsat slang to signify he had based the book on Stalin’s communist totalitarianism of the early 20th century.
Alex’s language would appear to be a fusion of English, Russian and other tags of the author’s invention. ‘Horrorshow’ means ‘well’ or ‘good.’ And moloko means milk. As I got into the book, I found myself referring to the glossary less and less; as I could ‘viddy’ (see) the meaning of sentences quite easily.
Mind Control Technique in Fiction
Burgess begs the question if the ‘badness’ was forcibly taken from a man, does that make him good? Alex is forced to watch violence and mayhem whilst sinister doctors inject him with nausea-inducing drugs. This dodgy ‘Ludovico Technique’ is nothing short of operant conditioning; the forcible association of one thing with another. And when finished with, Alex can no longer maim without feeling sick, and to add insult to injury, his love for classical music and sex has also been tainted with such an association.
This is where the meaning of ‘Clockwork Orange’ becomes clear, as Alex reacquaints himself with the writer in the early part of the book, and discovers that Alex himself has become a clockwork orange, a fruit of nature that has undergone the mangle of the system to behave to order – like the mechanisms of a clock.
What does a Clockwork Orange Mean?
However, towards the end of the book, Alex sees another meaning to this pairing of words, in that he was a clockwork orange before suffering the fate of the Staja prison. Stages of growing up, including his wanton acts of teen-hood are determined by the ‘clock’ of maturation. A man/woman goes through similar formative periods in life, as does Alex, each coming and going. And we can see that Alex did not need the system to eventually subdue his violent ways as he starts to crave a more ordered life.
A grim tale that does end on a lighter note after Alex comes through the tussle of political propaganda. A man apparently is not a man without free will.
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