A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

 Anthony Burgess. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Penguin, 1972. (originally, 1962)

Language: This volume has waited for years in my TBR pile. I feared that the language would defeat me as Burgess had devised a futuristic British teen gang slang for his narrator Alex's telling of his early years of "wilding" and incarceration in a future dystopian Great Britain. The language proved to be not a problem. It was readable without making my own glossary. Unfamiliar words were usually in context and the specifics not that necessary. The reader gets the violence. Someone did something to a victim. The introduction which I always read afterwards was useful. 

Title: Another language mystery for me was the meaning of the title. It turns out that what we here in Canada call a "wind-up toy" is referred to in the UK as a "clockwork" toy, wound like a clock by a key. And that a clockwork orange would be the height of uselessness, not to mention its disrespect to the idea of an orange itself. It becomes a metaphor for society's shortcomings, mistakes, especially the way we expect humans to act, to behave, as obediently as mechanical toys. Stupid mechanical toys. 

Themes: A third hesitation I had was memories of the violence associated with the 1970s movie (starring Malcolm McDowell, now the grandfather on Son of a Critch). There are scenes of violence, somewhat mitigated by being related by the perpetrator himself and thus "minimized". B&Es, assaults, rapes. And violence inflicted on the convicted Alex, offered as a way out of prison. It seems Burgess objected to the way the movie seemed to glorify the violence and failed to deal with the more important issues: why they do it, and what it means to be human. This is especially related to the treatment (aversion to violence therapy) offered to convicts, turning them into a mechanical toy who rejects violence because it makes him sick, not because of any moral or ethical reasons. Alex has become the clockwork orange.