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| This month features A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, Penguin Modern Classic, £7.99, 0141182601 |
The status of A Clockwork Orange has recently changed. With Stanley Kubrick's death and the UK release of the film first in the cinema, and later on video and DVD - the book and the film now stand alongside one another as legitimate objects. The film has lost the allure of the censored; the book has gained - something, anything, nothing?
What distinguishes the original version of A Clockwork Orange from page one is the warped language, Nadsat (teenspeak) - the bastard offspring of English, transliterated Slavic, Burgess and Roma. (A Nadsat dictionary is easily locatable via search engines.) The speech rhythms still seem jerkily contemporary, as if, Alex, your humble narrator, samples and cuts up what he is saying as he is saying it. In fact, the book contains a number of different conflicting languages. At one point it becomes pathetically clear that Alex's own hipspeak is rapidly going out of date. (Unlike the novel itself, which - in contrast to other visions of the future - 1984, Brave New World, Neuromancer - really could have been written yesterday.)
A Clockwork Orange is also a novel notable for its crudity. It has an incredibly simple structure: first night, second night, prison, aftermath. Burgess's satire isn't subtle, nor are his references (Ludwig Van) obscure. Perhaps this is why A Clockwork Orange is by far his most popular (with the public) and influential (with other writers) novel. Although some might insist it was the public who had been malinfluenced, whereas the writers merely enjoyed the novel. The intended moral of the novel is clearly stated: 'Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?'
Burgess, however much he wanted to, was never going to be another Joyce; if only because he came so soon after Joyce. But he could be - in both the easiest and most difficult senses - a true post-modernist. A Clockwork Orange is constructed in pure and violent opposition to the very culture (Western-liberal-Christian) it seeks to defend. Which is probably why it continues to fascinate. Now is the time to read it.
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