Review of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

*A Clockwork Orange* by Anthony Burgess (1962). Published by W. W. Norton & Company.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

I’ve been dubbing this period as funemployment while I look for a job, but the job market isn’t looking too great right now. Regardless, I spend a lot of time in my local library, and because I am such a big fan of simple living, I enjoy the little moments where I can find a book for free here or there, while also supporting such a critical aspect of my community.

Anyways, like my last written review of Fleishman is in Trouble, I was wandering my local library in search of something new to read when I found A Clockwork Orange. I knew this was a classic piece of literature, but it was never anything I had to read in school.

I decided to pick it up with Fleishman is in Trouble because I had so much time now due to the unemployment. I finished both books within the week of getting them, and returned them to the library exactly a week after picking them up.

Let’s get into the actual review! I know intros can be rambling and long, so I don’t want to bore you with the details.

The head of a small teenage gang is imprisoned for his actions.

This is a novel that takes place in the future, in the United Kingdom. A note about this is that the novel was written in 1962, over sixty years before when I am typing this, so the future that the book takes place in might actually be the present day if we’re thinking about it realistically.

The main character is Alex, who has a penchant for violence and crime. He leads a group of four other guys to commit crimes against people, and they go up against other local gangs. They even beat a writer until he’s left crippled by them, and Alex even rapes the guy’s wife.

His group wants to go even higher with their crime levels, but Alex disagrees and goes against his own crew. He breaks into a rich woman’s home and beats her with one of her own sculptures, but he’s betrayed by one of his crew members and left to be arrested by the police.

He gets 14 years in prison for what he’s done, and a good chunk of the novel is now about how he is in jail. We see as he tries to become a test subject with the government, which they accept and begin psychologically experimenting on him. The rest of the novel is about how he is trying to get out, succeeds in doing so, and then finds out the world has changed without him.

And, eventually, maybe even someone like Alex is capable of changing. At the beginning of the novel he kind of goes through life not expecting consequences, but when he ends up on jail and gets out, he finds out there are so many different kinds of consequences for his actions.

One of the most interesting parts of the novel for me is the writing style itself. Burgess chose to write this in a dialect spoken by Alex, inspired by Russian, which is something that we’ve seen in the past, especially when it comes to writing about groups not often depicted in mainstream media.

Overall Thoughts

Well, I could see why this book is considered a classic. I hate the term classic because of how exclusive it is, choosing to not include nonwhite writers and those not considered within the dominant class, such as women. That said, this is a critique on juvenile violence and what happens within systemic issues like this, so I can also see how this was banned in the US at one point.

I’m glad I read it at least once. I think it’s an important novel to read, especially as I come from a place called Baltimore. Those not from the US probably don’t know what the significance of this statement is, but youth violence and how it becomes a cycle, perpetuated by systemic issues, are a very real problem here.

The state and how it tries to fix these problems plays a key role in the novel, especially as it pertains to Alex’s behavior. I recently wrote of Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, where the state incarcerates anyone deemed a risk by AI, and the protagonist, who has done nothing, is put into the prison because AI sees her as a potential criminal.

So all in all, what I am trying to say is that this can be a profound novel. I don’t think I will be returning to it any time soon, but it is definitely worth reading at least once.

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