The word that best describes my initial reaction to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange is "perplexing." The story was completely bizarre and somehow extremely familiar. I know it sounds weird, but I feel like I know someone who acts kind of like Alex, repeating words three times and acting tough but listening to classical music in their spare time. Maybe I just have some odd friends.
In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. It's about a young boy, out causing trouble while speaking in an unfamiliar dialect, who goes through a brief transformation before returning to his old ways. That's probably where the parallels end, though. Where Huck is a redeemable character, helping out Jim and generally trying to make a good life for himself in the only way he knows how, Alex is different. He's young like Huck, only fifteen in the horrible first part of the novel, but commits horrible crimes like assault, rape, and murder without any smidgen of remorse. It's been five years or so since I've read Mark Twain's book, but I remember him doing ridiculous things like stowing away or stealing because he needed the money to survive or he was helping someone. Alex, on the other hand, did things that were against the law for the sole reason that it gave him pleasure. He enjoyed beating up old men and and leaving people bleeding in the gutter.
I have to say, the first couple chapters of this book were hard to read. And not just because half of the words are made up. In part one, the reader is tagging along while Alex and his gang (his "droogs") do drugs, break into houses, beat people senseless, rape women, seducing little girls, and killing an old lady. It's disgusting and disturbing to follow them do these things so nonchalantly, like it's a typical Friday night. And for them, sadly, it was.
It was no surprise then when Alex was hauled off to jail. He was a menace to society and everyone knew it, except maybe his mother, who it seemed to live in denial. The state of the jail didn't surprise me either - overcrowded, dangerous, unrefomative. "Cram criminals together and see what happens. You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment," explains one of the jailers. So they take him out and send him to a government facility where he can be turned into a new citizen.
This section reminded me a lot of George Orwell's 1984. When they put him in the room and made him watch films all I could think of was the "Two Minutes' Hate" propaganda that the government forced everyone to watch. In both circumstances they were made to watch things they didn't want to in order to be brainwashed by the government. Granted, Alex's experience was heightened by whatever concoction they injected into his system that caused him to associate pain with violence, which made it even worse than Big Brother's hate videos.
This is a small book, but there is so much going on. What is it about society that has made it possible for hooligans to run the streets at night causing this much chaos? Why are intellectuals seen as outcasts? How did this bizarre slang come about? The prison chaplain was an interesting touch, trying to practice Christianity in a world where kids like Alex wish they were the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross, because it would be satisfyingly "ultra-violent."
Despite his political selfishness and anger, I think I liked the character of F. Alexander, the writer whose wife had been raped and beaten by Alex and his droogs that later took him in and recognized him as a victim of the state. F. knew that what they had done to Alex was wrong - they had taken away his free will, and as F. quotes, "A man who ceases to choose ceases to be a man." It would be better to choose his own way and be bad then be forced to do good, the writer argues, which is true. Without choice we are nothing but machines, which is the premise in the book written by F. Alexander, also called A Clockwork Orange. He writes that people are being turned into machines when they are more like fruit, naturally cultivated on a tree grown in the "world-orchard" and planted by God because He "had need of us to quench his thirsty love." It's a fascinating explanation.
By the end of the novel, Alex realizes that he does not want to be clockwork, and is glad when he is re-reformed to not be affected when seeing violence. The last chapter sees him at 18, released into the world, realizing that there is more to life than "ultra-violence" and finally wishing for a normal, settled-down life. Maybe in this sense he becomes like Huck Finn again.
I can see why this is considered a classic, with it's foreboding future, themes of free will and liberty, and a timelessness that makes it seem set in modern times despite it having been written nearly 50 years ago. Now I have another film to add to my watch list: Stanley Kubrick's 1971 adaptation, a classic in and of itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment