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March 19, 1963

Books of The Times
Special to The New York Times

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
By Anthony Burgess.

A Clockwork Orange” is a brilliant novel. In young Alex, Anthony Burgess has created the most interesting delinquent since Pinky in Graham Green’s “Brighton Rock.” Alex is vicious, depraved, anarchic, a pure little monster, and the purity of his dedication to evil keeps lighting his deeds like some grotesque halo.

Alex’s choice of evil is total and enthusiastic; his aimlessness is electric, like a shark switching around to the nearest scent; his intelligence is sharply practical and of a high order. The novel is about this individual versus the State, which removes his capacity for choice, turning him into a mass of conditioned reflexes, all wholesome and good. It is a weird little morality tale, told in a taut, telescoped style that gives the effect of a continuous close-up. The narrator is Alex himself.

The chilling thing about Mr. Burgess’s approach is that his novel is an intimate memoir from the future. For Alex lives in a world that is all one, that has conquered space, that has no problems except social cancer. As we look out through Alex’s eyes on the immediate present (like an animal Alex has little sense of past or future), the author suggests the total condition of the strange new world outside a world inimical to and yet favoring Alex and his hoodlum-beatniks.

‘Uses ‘Hip’ Language

The “hip” language that Alex and his “droogs” (gangmates) speak is a further development in the lingo of the outsiders. It lights up page after page in pin-ball machine fashion, and midway through the book you can understand it as well as Alex. Fighting a rebellious droog, Alex says, “I had just ticklewickled his fingers with my brava (knife), and there he was looking at the malenky (little) dribble of krovvy (blood) that was reddening out in the lamplight.” This device could easily have become a bore, but Mr. Burgess handles it with intelligence and for a purpose. The neologisms are provocative, their logic often ironically apparent (cigarettes are called “cancers”), and by the end of the book one is left with a satisfactory sense of having learned a language and become part of an in-group, which is exactly Mr. Burgess’s purpose.

Alex’s progress is existentially thrilling. He is a connoisseur of aimless choice. Like God, he singles out someone for destruction on a whim. Thus he and his gang beat up a scholar, have a rumble with another gang, steal a car, beat up a writer, rape his wife. Alex himself goes one better by raping two 10-year-old children, but finally runs out of luck when breaking and entering an old lady’s house. She dies and Alex goes to Staja (State Jail) after getting brutally beaten up by millicents (police). In all this, the blank absence of morality is like an enormous exaggeration of the dead-pan of Camus’ anti- hero in “The Stranger.”

Part Two--like a play there are three acts--finds Alex currying favor by way of the Bible, and being a model prisoner, i.e., one who gives the illusion of redemption. But it all goes when he and his cell-mates murder an objectionable new arrival. They all blame Alex, so he is selected for Ludovico’s Technique, a conditioning process that makes him ill at the sight, sound, smell, or thought of violence--even the Bible is too much for the reconditioned hero. The reconditioning is done by forcing Alex to witness overdoses of violence on film, with his eyelids clipped open. He is then (Part III) turned loose, trapped like a rat inside a cage of reflexes, to becomes a political pawn and allow the author to reap a bagful of morals.

Superior to Unchosen Good

The main moral is that evil chosen is superior to unchosen good. The point that Alex’s initial evil is as much a result of conditioning by society as it is his own free choice is ignored. Fortunately Mr. Burgess does not weaken his book by offering answers to the individual’s anti-social perversions or to collective surgery on the individual’s free will. He tells an abruptly fascinating story that lands again and again on these two large targets. In fact his eagerness to hit his targets runs a little away with him in the second half of the book; instead of allowing the irony to grow from his situations he tends to force it on them, occasionally blunting the slicing edge of his prose. But all in all, “A Clockwork Orange” is a tour-de-force in nastiness, an inventive primer in total violence, a savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds.

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