I found myself cursing Burgess, telling him that it wasn’t fair to put his readers through something like that. Initially this nadsat language was nearly incomprehensible to me, and my first response to it was bad. Those who have seen the film will know that Alex (the anti-hero) and his droogs (friends) speak a made-up language full of Russian loanwords, Shakespearean and Biblical influences and Cockney rhyming slang. It is also quite an artistic and linguistic achievement. The American version, on which Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was based, ends on a less optimistic note.) In short, it’s a novella of ideas which just happens to contain a fair bit of violence. And ultimately, of one man’s decision to say goodbye to all that.
Of alienation and how to deal with the excesses to which such alienation may lead. Of whether it is better to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good.
Rather it’s an exploration of the morality of free will. (Burgess later wrote in his autobiography: ‘I was sickened by my own excitement at setting it down.’) Yet it does not glorify violence, nor is it a book about violence per se. It features lengthy descriptions of heinous crimes, and they’re vivid descriptions, full of excitement. I’m not going to deny here that the book contains violence. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.Ī Clockwork Orange is one of those books which everyone has heard of but which few people have actually read –- mostly, I think, because it is preceded by a reputation of shocking ultra-violence. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. He published studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific journalist, writing in several languages. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East the Enderby quartet of novels about a poet and his muse Nothing Like the Sun, a recreation of Shakespeare's love-life A Clockwork Orange, an exploration of the nature of evil and Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century. Born in Manchester, he lived for long periods in Southeast Asia, the USA and Mediterranean Europe as well as in England. He was also a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.Īnthony Burgess was a British novelist, critic and composer.
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