So I could bore you with apologies about how I've not posted in like months and all. I could cry to you about how I have a new job and it has been stressful and all... or I could just post a book review. Yeah let's do that.
So Clockwork is one of those nice, thin books on the 1001 that can be read in an afternoon yet still counts for the same amount of reading as a girt long book like Les Mis (yeah I'm still not over it). It's set in the not to distant future (well not to distant from the early 1960's when it came out, it still having vinyl records and all it kinda felt dated to this 2013 reader) where teenagers run round raping and stealing all night and no one seems to give a god damn about it. Alex is our narrator, and him and his gang run round all night being vile and rapey and unpleasant to give us a taste of the future. They beat up old people, ruin some books (those bastards!), rob a shop, steal a car, invade a home, beat up a couple and then gang rape the wife.
Yeah it's all real unpleasant, I can see why people objected to this book, it's hella nasty, but what is creepy is how quickly you become desensitised to it all. After the first like 20 pages of mindless violence it just blends into one long, dull account, so that when Alex gets up the next day and heads off in to town to pick up a couple of 10 year old girls to get drunk and rape, it's just sort of old hat really. What is even more creepy is you start to actually like Alex, he may be a murderous, rapist thug but he's somehow loveable. And when his gang of 'droogs' (more on that language issue later) turn on him and he ends up getting arrested I was genuinly distressed for the poor young delinquent.
see, he's sorry really!
So Alex gets carted off to prison, which he is very indignant about but really, given that he has just murdered an old lady on top of the previous acts of violence, rape and pedophilia, it all seems quite fair. He does a few years in prison then murders another inmate which is seen as the final straw. He is put forward for a new technique to 'cure' him and make him into a good person. As it means he'll get out of prison early he volunteers. He is then exposed to lots and lots of videos of vile, horrible things while being given medication to make him feel sick, the result being that any hint of violence makes him want to vom.
This is where, for me, the book gets interesting. Alex leaves prison unable to do bad, but as a result gets victimised by the very victims he used to torment. He is unable to defend himself, and even though his victims know he has been reformed (it's in all the papers) they still want to beat the living crap out of him, and they do. The trouble is, as the governor of Alex's prison suggests, that there is no punishment, and people want to see a wrong doer being punished. Alex is eventually driven to commit suicide by a political group opposed to the government that has reformed him, but he fails and the conditioning is 'undone' so he has the option of being violent again.
So, the ethics teacher in me asks, can you be good if you don't have the option of being bad? Well the problem seems to be that you never really see Alex as bad in the book. Sure he does some horrific things, but he doesn't seem to do them out of any real spite of viciousness, but just because he enjoys it and because he can. He is like an animal that can't help himself, he is charming and intelligent and he just likes to rape and kill. Other characters, such as Alex's friend Dim who betrays him to the police and then becomes a member of the police and viciously beats Alex, is far less likeable as his intention seems to be to hurt; Alex doesn't want to hurt he just wants to have fun. By contrast, the reformed Alex cannot do bad doesn't really seem to do any good either, he can't hit people, but he fails to do anything that is actually good in the time he is reformed. When he comes home to his parents who have taken in a lodger in him place, he still shouts and makes them feel guilty, he has no compassion for their situation, nor does he feel shamed that his parents have had to resort to getting a lodger to occupy his room. But this all upsets me because I feel like I want to say the book implys violence is OK, but it doesn't say that. It's complicated and makes my brain hurt. DAMN YOU BURGESS!
Phew, a picture of a cute hedgehog helped there! Right the language, yeah it took me like 10 mins to read the first page cause I was looking up every word in the glossary at the back and I was like 'damn this is going to get irritating, even if this book is only 120 pages long'. Then I stopped looking stuff up and it sort of got easier to understand, and by the end I was using words like 'horrorshow' and 'malenky' in everyday conversation, much to the confusion of my significant other. So yeah the language is kinda cool, even though I thought it would be mega irritating and it was the principle reason why I never read this book sooner. Well played Burgess, well played.
The Film
Man, Kubrick is fucked up. I mean the book was kinda fucked up, but the film is like major fucked up. No wonder it got banned! Case in point, in the book Alex goes to prison for killing an old lady with lots of cats, in the flim Alex goes down for beating a much younger lady to death with a massive penis. Why Kubrick? Did you read the book and think 'this needs a girt penis in it because there simply isn't enough sex and violence'? Dude, if you weren't already dead I'd advise therapy, pronto.
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