Comprehensive information and links about Clockwork Orange, A

Clockwork Orange, A is a science fiction 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, and forms the basis for the 1971 film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. The novel is widely regarded as a successor to earlier great fiction novels such as .

It is one of Burgess's 'terminal novels,' written to provide posthumous income for his wife after Burgess had allegedly been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.

Burgess wrote that the title came from an old Cockney expression "As queer as a clockwork orange." ¹ Due to his time serving the British Colonial Office in Malaya, Burgess thought that the phrase could be used to punningly refer to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) non-human (orang, Malay for "person"). The Italian title, "Un'Arancia ad Orologeria" was interpreted to refer to a grenade. Burgess wrote in his later introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked," that a creature who can only perform good or evil is "a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil."

In his essay "Clockwork Oranges"² he says that "this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness." This title alludes to the protagonist's negatively conditioned responses to feelings of evil which prevent the exercise of his free will.

The book was partly inspired by an event in 1944, when Burgess' pregnant wife Lynn was robbed and beaten by four U.S. GI deserters in a London street, suffering a miscarriage and chronic gynaecological problems³. According to Burgess, writing the novel was both a catharsis and an "act of charity" towards his wife's attackers - the story is narrated by and essentially sympathetic to one of the attackers rather than their victim.

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Set in the near future, the book centres around the life of the fifteen year old protagonist Alex. Alex and his gang roam the streets at night, committing crimes purely for enjoyment. The crimes described in the book increase in severity, from assault, to robbery, to a fight with rival gang, culminating when the gang breaks into the house of F.D. Alexander and rapes his wife. The gang returns to a bar where Alex hits one of his gang members, Dim, as punishment for Dim's rude behaviour towards a woman who was singing the chorus of Ode to Joy, classical music being Alex's other passion, apart from violence. This sparks off a tense moment between the two gang members.

The next day, after fighting Dim and George to re-establish his control of the gang following the previous night's dispute Alex agrees, on Pete's suggestion, to rob a house in a rich part of town. Alex tries to persuade the woman living in the house to open the door. The woman refuses and calls the police as a precaution. He gains access to the house through a window, but is confronted by the defiant woman, who defends herself with unexpected strength, he goes for a bust of Beethoven and she scratches his face, he manages to knock her out with a silver statue he had previously taken. As he runs out the front door he is struck by Dim who runs off with the rest of the gang just as the police arrive. At the police station we learn that the woman has died.

In prison, Alex hears about an experimental rehabilitation programme called "the Ludovico technique", which promises that the prisoner will be released upon completion of the two week treatment and will not commit crimes afterwards and manages to become the first patient. The Ludovico technique itself is a form of aversion therapy, where Alex is given a drug that induces extreme nausea while being forced to watch graphically violent films. At the end of the treatment Alex is unable to carry out or even contemplate violent acts as doing so induces crippling nausea.

He is released from prison, but upon returning home he is rejected by his parents. Dejected, Alex contemplates suicide, going to the public library in order to discover what sort of poison he might take to end his life. There he is spotted by one of his former victims, who accompanied by his friends extracts his revenge. Alex - unable to defend himself - calls the police for help. The police arrive, but they turn out to be Dim, and Billy Boy, the former leader of a rival gang. They take Alex, beat him up and dump him by the side of the road out in the country.

Alex stumbles to the nearest house for help, which turns out to be that of F.D. Alexander, whose wife Alex had raped and beaten earlier in the book. At first Alex is not recognised as he had always worn a mask, but the reader discovers that F.D. Alexander is in a wheel chair and his wife died from her injuries. Realising that Alex is the same person who had attacked him and his wife some years ago, F.D. Alexander drugs him, locks him in a room and plays Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at full volume. Although previously his favourite piece of music the Ninth was also used as a soundtrack for one of the films that Alex was forced to watch as part of the Ludovico treatment, hence it produces the same nauseating effects on him. Unable to stand the pain Alex throws himself out the window to try to kill himself. He survives the fall with broken bones and wakes up in hospital informed that his tormentors have been arrested and the Ludovico treatment reversed.

The final chapter begins identically to the first, Alex having formed a new gang and reverted to his previous criminality. But on this particular night he decides not to join them and goes for a walk on his own instead. In a cafe he bumps into one of his old gang member Pete, who is married and has become a "respectable" member of society. Pete's wife giggles at Alex's rhetoric, and asks Pete "why does he speak like that?" After conversing with Pete and his wife Alex has an epiphany, renouncing violence on one hand, but on the other "realising" that his behaviour was an unavoidable part of youth, and that if he had a son, he would not be able to stop him from doing what he did.

Although the book is divided into three parts, each containing seven chapters, twenty-one being a symbolic number as it was the age that which a child earns his rights at the time, the 21st chapter was omitted from the versions published in the US. The film adaptation which was directed by Stanley Kubrick follows the American version of the book, ending prior the events of the 21st chapter. Kubrick claimed that he had not read the original version until he had virtually finished the screenplay, but that he certainly never gave any serious consideration to using it.

Analysis

The book, narrated by Alex, contains many words in a slang dialect which Burgess invented for the book, called nadsat. It is a mix of modified Russian words, English slang and words invented by Burgess himself. It serves two functions, firstly Burgess, while wanting to provide his young characters with their own register did not want to use contemporary slang, fearing that this would "date" the book too much. Secondly, the novel graphically describes horrific scenes of violence, which would be shocking even by today's standards, so nadsat is used as a "linguistic veil" to distance the reader from the action on the page.

Both the story and individual elements have had a strong influence on popular culture in general and popular music in particular, although this is probably due to the movie's popularity rather than the novel's.

The novel was originally 'inspired' by an attack on Burgess's first wife Lynn, in blacked-out London, during the blitz. Four GI deserters are said to have attacked Lynn to rob her, beating her so that she miscarried and suffered lifelong dysmenorrhea. Contrary to legend, she was not raped.Alex's age at the end of the novel is the same age that the Burgesses' miscarried child would have been at the date of publication, had the child survived the attack on Lynn, been born and grown up. is totally unknown to history: The first recorded use of it is Burgess's title. Quoted in a Rolling Stone article, Burgess claimed to have first heard the expression "from a very old Cockney in 1945" and then sat down to think of a story to go with it. One early idea apparently involved a strike or riot among apprentices under Elizabeth I. the author F Alexander wrote a book entitled 'A Clockwork Orange' and it is his wife who is attacked by the droogs, it seems likely Burgess directly inserted some of his own feelings and characteristics into the novel in the form of this character. was also the nickname for the Dutch national soccer teams of the early 1970s, for their precision passing and ballhandling and the team's orange jerseys. is also the name of a supposed 1970s hard-right-wing MI5 operation led by one Colin Wallace, designed to discredit the Irish Republicans, Harold Wilson and his Labour Party, and the Conservative's leader Edward Heath, ultimately putting Margaret Thatcher in power. ([1], [2]. The name was used on the floor of the House on February 1, 1990. [3]) is the current name of the Princeton Men's Club Ultimate (sport) team. The women's team also shares this name, though it is often referred to as Lady Clockwork.[4] is a familiar in the online game Kingdom of Loathing and a pun on Clockwork Orange. Its attack messages such as "<name> delivers a horrorshow tolchok to your opponent's gulliver" heavily feature Nadsat slang. is the name of a British company formed by former employees of the Secret Service who specialize in Ethical Hacking and internal investigations on behalf of big business using sometimes controversial methods.