synopsis:

This first person story is told by Alex, a youth but of fifteen that spends his nights with his friends, or "droogs", terrorizing the public with their bits of "ultraviolence", and engaging in the old "in-out in-out". He is a contradiction of characteristics, as he sips milk (moloko) laced with drugs, and listens to Beethoven while in the midst of raping a young girl.

While the story sounds graphic the book is not explicit. Part of this arises from the author's brilliant language system, ‘nadsat', which in fact translates to "teenager". Nadsat is a combination of altered russian and odd bits of slang, and is constantly being spoken by Alex and his droogs. The other characters in the book, like his parents, do not speak nadsat, nor do they fully understand what it is that Alex speaks at times.

The novella is split among three books, each of seven chapters. The first details his crimes. He beats the elderly, fights other gangs, with a razor knife "britva", no less, rapes girls, drinks much moloko, and finally, assaults a woman, inflicting mortal wounds. He is betrayed by his droogs and is sent to prison.

The second book chronicles his time spent in prison, and it overlaps into the third book, primarily focusing on his treatment. He is treated in a strange manner, in a method that alters his mind with a combination of drugs and horrifying visuals. He is changed to a point where the very thought of sex or violence (and even music) is enough to give him nausea. He reaches a stage where his humanity is in question, and Burgess is probing the fundamentals of moral choice and free will, essentially asking, "Is a person necessarily good if he is incapable of choosing evil?"The final portion of the book shows an Alex that is now a victim, unable to fight back against his many enemies from previous encounters (several years have passed). Everyone takes a swipe at him, and he is helpless to do anything. By the end, he learns, he has been given a new chance at life. The final chapter was originally cut in America and in the film, but it is really the most interesting of all. In it, after meeting the only droog to remain loyal to him, now wed, he realizes that he, too, would like a wife, and possibly a child. But he must wonder, will his child follow the same path of self destruction?

on this book:

Easily Anthony Burgess's most famous book - and his personal least favorite - 'A Clockwork Orange' would have become a controversial work in the 20th-century canon even if not for Stanley Kubrick's stylized 1971 film adaptation. Burgess examines the totalitarian aspects of socialism - especially its subliminal use of mass media for mind-control - and disturbingly parodies the immaturity of British youth culture. These two themes combined with the central question of free will in an ironic way after the film's release. "Copycat" crimes based on those in the film sprang up around the United Kingdom, and Kubrick eventually decided to ban the film in the U.

K. (only recently, after his death, has it been re-released).