"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess

“A Clockwork Orange” is Anthony Burgess’s twisted vision of the future. In the English town where the action takes place, the youth rule the streets with avid violence and crime. The protagonist, fifteen-year-old Alex DeLarge is no different. Every night, Alex, alongside his friends Dim, Pete, and Georgie, roams the streets committing brutal acts of violence, speaking his own dialect called nadsat, and stealing from innocent people.

The novel begins at the beginning of a normal night in Alex’s life. He is sitting at the Korova Milkbar, a popular hangout, with his friends, drinking spiked milk and bracing himself for a night of crime. He leads his gang to start fights with innocent pedestrians and other gangs, steal a car, and trash the house of a writer and his wife, destroying the writer’s manuscript of his masterpiece, “A Clockwork Orange.” The night concludes with Dim and Alex getting into a fight after Dim mocks the classical music that Alex thrives on. The fight causes Alex’s gang to reach the end of their patience with their leader, and the next time they go out, Dim attacks Alex, and the gang leaves Alex at the house they were all breaking into. The police soon come and joyfully discover Alex, a notorious criminal, and take him to jail. Alex lasts in jail for a few years, staying sane by indulging in the violence in the Old Testament. One day he receives an offer to participate in a two week long experiment called Ludovico’s Technique. He does not learn the details of the experiment except that it will get him out of jail early, so he agrees to try it. The experiment begins with Alex being injected with “calming medicine” that actually makes him incredibly sick and nauseous. After being injected with the substance, Alex is forced to watch movies filled with violence while having his eyelids pried open. The goal of the experiment is to brainwash Alex into associating the nausea and sickness with violence and crime. Eventually, to Alex’s horror, the movie includes classical music, forcing Alex to be disgusted by the thing he loved most. After the two weeks are over, Alex feels the nausea while watching crime or listening to classical music even without the substance injected. The scientists in charge of the experiment plan to introduce it to society, and Alex is allowed back into the real world. He quickly discovers that his old friend, Dim, and his rival, Billyboy, are now police officers together. They both beat Alex up, knowing he could not defend himself due to the brainwashing. They drive away, leaving Alex alone and injured in the countryside, to crawl to the nearest house, which coincidentally turns out to be the writer’s house he trashed in the beginning of the novel. The writer, whose wife died from shock after the torture Alex’s gang forced on her, doesn’t recognize Alex as his wife’s murderer but as the brainwashed boy all over the news, so he takes him in, feeling sympathetic toward Alex’s lack of free will. He plans to use Alex to downplay the government, but quickly grows suspicious of Alex’s use of his own language, nadsat, for he had not forgotten the language of the teenagers who abused his wife. He then locks Alex in a room with classical music blasting, hoping to cause Alex to commit suicide, so he could blame it on the government. Alex jumps out of the window, but instead of dying, ends up in the hospital unconscious. The government, in order to bring their reputation up again, reversed Ludovico’s Technique if Alex agrees to endorse them. Alex is finally free from jail and brainwashing and returns to his life of violence with a new gang, only to tire of it very quickly. He runs into his old friend Pete, who know has a wife and children, and Alex decides to settle down from violence.

Overall, “A Clockwork Orange” was extremely captivating. I found it very hard to put the book down. The themes and concepts in the novel were very satirical but incredibly interesting, such as the controversy around the government’s control of free will. I would gladly recommend this book as it is an incredible read if you can withstand the thick slang and vivid violence.