Most people, when referring to A Clockwork Orange, remember the Oscar award winning movie by Stanley  Kubrick with all the sex and violence, entirely overlook Burgess’ great novel . Burgess himself was far from overwhelmed with the movie adaptation:

The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die.”

Many moviegoers, who have bothered to read the book, still live under the assumption that Burgess was a science fiction writer. Nothing can be farther from the truth. It is Burgess’ incredible gift for language that makes this novel and many of the other brilliant books he wrote such great reading. For Clockwork Orange, Burgess invented a whole complete tongue-in-cheek lexicon of slang, using words like malchick meaning male or male (as in male chick) or in-out for intercourse. Often Burgess’ language is merely an attempt at taking rhyme one step further, as is typical of  cockney slang  – cutter is money because it rhymes with bread and butter which is the cockney slang for it. Other words probably just sounded funny enough to the author to earn admission as in ultra-violent (pun on ultra violet which was overused in the discos of the sixties). The title itself comes from the  cockney expression As queer as a clockwork orange.

   Burgess’ world is one of humor, literature and history, preferably combined. Just reading A Clockwork Orange, without troubling to peak into any of his other masterpieces, hardly allows you to understand, yet experience, the scope of Burgess’ genius. His work takes you through a fictional account of Shakespeare’s love life, the world of counter-espionage, a quartet of novels about Francis Xavier Enderby a poet who writes on the toilet, The End of the World News with apologies to Freud and Trotsky  and 1985 – his tribute to George Orwell. If that wasn’t enough he also put together with serious biographies of Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence and Hemingway.
What attracted me so deeply to Burgess was the way he successfully combined clever language, humor and philosophy in such a way as to keep you thinking about the book long after having finished it.
A few choice examples of his use of humor:

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation

Every dogma has its day

 He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

 But it would be wrong to give you the impression that his work is pure satire as the following quotes show.

Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don’t know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

I didn’t think; I experimented.

Thanks to the wonders of the web you can actually hear Anthony Burgess reading A Clockwork Orange himself here

 

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