A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess, 1962
★ 4.00 from 796.4k ratings on Goodreads
A teenage gang leader who loves violence and Beethoven tells his story in his own invented slang, until the state offers to cure him of choosing. Narrated in made-up slang by a sharp, witty voice, the book moves with uneasy energy through violence, satire, and moral argument.
Feels like unease, humor and wonder. About freedom, morality and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy unreliable first-person voices, invented language, and fiction that argues about free will and state power. Be warned that the slang takes work and some readers find it frustrating, while the violence is graphic and disturbing.
Why read it
It gives you a vivid, uncomfortable thought experiment about whether a person can be cured of choice, told with strange verbal invention and dark wit.
A page from the book
How a gang dresses to be feared, and the ranking stitched into it.
"The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider. Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is). Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a Doubting Thomas, the dimmest of we four. What readers say
Readers find the book provocative and memorable, with many gripped by its invented slang and moral questions, though some are frustrated by the language or find it overrated and less effective than the film. Its violence disturbs, and the ending divides opinion.
Anthony Burgess.Burgess said the title came from a Cockney phrase he'd heard in a pub, "as queer as a clockwork orange": something organic made mechanical, which is also the book's argument.
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Clockwork Orange for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy unreliable first-person voices, invented language, and fiction that argues about free will and state power. Be warned that the slang takes work and some readers find it frustrating, while the violence is graphic and disturbing.
- What is A Clockwork Orange like?
- Narrated in made-up slang by a sharp, witty voice, the book moves with uneasy energy through violence, satire, and moral argument. Feels like unease, humor and wonder. About freedom, morality and society.
- What should I read after A Clockwork Orange?
- If you liked A Clockwork Orange, try Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins), Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut) and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley).
A taste of the feed
What is the cost of convincing a system it is fragile?
“I think we’ll make this whole situation a lot simpler by agreeing not to lie to each other,” he says. “What do you think?” I think my tongue has frozen and speech will be impossible, so I surprise myself by answering back in a steady voice, “Yes, I think that would save time.” “Whatever problems anyone may have with the Capitol, believe me when I say that if it released its grip on the districts for even a short time, the entire system would collapse.” [...] “It must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down.”
Catching Fire · Suzanne Collins
What happens to a country that mistakes itself for a story.
As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues?
Breakfast of Champions · Kurt Vonnegut
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
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