Reviews
A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Creators |
Anthony Burgess (writer). |
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Extent |
Read in 2018. |
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Categorization |
At once a vicarious thriller, a futuristic dystopia, a satire of ephebiphobia and a proper bourgeois novel on the themes of liberty, personal maturation and the depths of human callousness. |
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Subject |
A boy likes to listen to classical music, lie, rape children and commit assault. He manipulates his way through life in a decaying future Britain where rebellious youths like him speak a mix of rhyming slang and Russian propaganda with ironic Shakespearean grammar. Jailed for murder at 15, he gets an experimental new treatment at 17, said to ensure that he will never come back to the overcrowded prison where he learned nothing. |
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Commentary |
The literary solipsism is a bit stodgy, especially the many chiastic second meetings and the book—“A Clockwork Orange”—within the book. Nonetheless, it works well enough. Through all his suffering, Alex is never sympathetic, nor does his monstrous behaviour rest on any cop-out theory of the tabula rasa. Violent protagonists are common, but they usually come with James Bond’s framing: An authorial, social or state sanction for the audience to accept the violence, and a vicarious power fantasy to make it feel good. There is none of that here. All the tricks for Overton acceptability with respect to social transgression—and audience identification—that Harrison pulled in The Stainless Steel Rat (1961) are absent. Alex is, first and foremost, a character who enjoys violence for realistic reasons. Burgess made this as creepy as it should be. For example, Alex’s appreciative reading of the Old Testament (ca. 164 BCE) in prison makes perfect sense. Most of its authors had his attitude to violence. |
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Adaptation: A Clockwork Orange (1971) IMDb
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