Just finished one of my son’s favorite books, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I recently watched the movie for the first time, and unlike my son, I liked the movie better. It is a pretty faithful adaptation, except the movie doesn’t carry over the final chapter.
The book is written in the first person by “your humble narrator” Alex. Alex is a teenager in a near-future dystopian society where cops are barely keeping lawlessness at bay. Speaking in a language full of slang called “nadsat” (it does take a little while to understand what all the made-up words mean), Alex tells his tale. He and his hoodlum friends spend their nights performing horrendous acts of violence, from beating up the homeless, to breaking-and-entering, to rape. On one such night, Alex ends up killing one of their victims and is arrested, while the others in his troop make their getaway.
In jail, Alex becomes the test subject of a government psychological experiment to rehabilitate. Through a drug program, they make it so Alex becomes ill whenever he even thinks about doing something violent. Just 2 years into his sentence, Alex is released as a new man. His past catches up to him though, as he runs in to many of his previous victims, who can now retaliate against him without fear of Alex fighting back. He eventually ends up back at the home of a woman he raped, who has since killed herself, and her widowed husband recognizes him. The husband sees a way to use Alex’s case to discredit the current reviled government, and forces Alex to commit suicide by jumping out of a window.
Alex survives however, and the government officials swoop in to blame the other party and the doctors that did all this to Alex in the first place. They put Alex back to the way his was, reviving his evil tendencies. Here is where the film ends, with the applied assumption that Alex will revert to his sociopathic ways. The book’s final chapter though shows that Alex has “grown up,” and wants to leave the past and become a man and raise a family. Even without coercion, he no longer wants to do evil.
The novel’s end feels too clean cut for me, and I much prefer the open-ending unknown of the film finale. The book does do a much better job of detailing all the little nuances going on in the background, such as the questions of good vs evil, less in regards to Alex’s actions and more involving the government’s removing of his free will. I like the invented language of nadsat which makes the book seem like an entirely different time and place. Not my favorite book in this book reading adventure, but still a good one.
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