Eloquent in Nadsat, his teen argot, a heady mix of Russian, romany and rhyming slang, Alex narrates his career as the leader of a gang of “droogs”, Peter, Georgie and Dim. Self-consciously trangressive (the title probably comes from some cockney slang for “queer”, though not in any sexual sense), A Clockwork Orange tells the story of Alex, a Beethoven-mad thug with a lovely internal monologue. Burgess’s novel – sometimes described as “a novella” – also addresses, but in less ideological terms, the corruptions of state power while also debating free will and human responsibility. But the book, not Kubrick’s script, is the essential text, a stunningly original novel that opened many literary doors for the work of subsequent British writers such as Martin Amis, JG Ballard and Will Self, and a volume bursting with linguistic energy that continues to startle and inspire generations of new readers.Īccording to the Burgess scholar, Andrew Biswell, A Clockwork Orange was originally set in 1980 and is animated by an internal debate with another great dystopia, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (no. The second, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, is the brilliant cinematic adaptation a controversial masterpiece, released in 1971, that everyone remembers. There’s the novel, written in 1961 by Anthony Burgess a short, brilliant, dystopian polemic intended, he said, as “a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice”. T here are two possible approaches to A Clockwork Orange and it’s best to address this up front.
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