My Problem with Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange...

     I am not very cinematically cultured. If I had a penny for every time someone asked me, "Have you seen [movie X]? What? No? You haven't? But it's classic!", I'd be a very rich girl indeed. And more times than I can count, "movie X" has been A Clockwork Orange. More times than I can count, I've heard about what a beautiful piece of film it is, how gripping and thrilling and moving, how many perspectives it has changed and how many minds it has both baffled and scarred. "Oh, and the book." "It's my favorite." “The things it does with language. It’s just magical.”

     So, with extremely high expectations, I picked up a copy of the trim little paperback, curled up into a ball, and prepared myself for a mindblowing experience. But in the first few pages, my mind was just confused. The “Nadsat” slang with Slavic roots used in the novel was confusing and unnecessary, and even though the difficulty of interpreting the foreign words rapidly faded as the book wore on, it never lost the feeling of irrelevance. The only point at which I felt Nadsat was truly necessary and had any meaning whatsoever despite the painfully obvious need to differentiate the young and “ultraviolent” Nadsat from their older victims was when the slang language was used exclusively in descriptions of particularly gory, violent acts. Then, the foreign words conveyed their meaning adequately, but the true horror of the actions they described was dulled by unfamiliar words. Burgess, in his introduction, addressed this as well, explaining that Nadsat’s primary use was to dull the blows of the shockingly violent actions of those speaking it, similar to the mindset employed by Nadsat speakers to muffle the emotional response that their horrible acts should have elicited.

     Which brings me to my second problem with A Clockwork Orange. The reader is never given the opportunity to come to realizations such as the true point of the Nadsat tongue on their own. Any meaning beyond what is superficially obvious is either told to the reader in the author’s introduction (he too, I might add, was not entirely satisfied with the novel, though for reasons that differ from my own), or explicitly stated in the text itself. The grand underlying theme of the novel—that a person’s humanness is based on their ability to make rational choices, and once that ability to make moral choices is taken away, humanness is taken away with it—which is easy enough to uncover and ponder and could potentially be extremely interesting and complex and subtle simply is not because rather than allow the reader to come to some profound realization unaided, Burgess instead has a wise prison reverend state a simplified version blatantly to the main character. Any joy that might have come from that moment of epiphany when the purpose of the novel, what everything means, snaps into clarity, is stripped from the book by having it be spoonfed to the reader.

     Really, those are my only two problems with  A Clockwork Orange. Beyond these two, I found it be interesting and, for the most part, compelling. Subtlety, however, was lacking, and for me, subtlety is a must.

Books that have stuck with me over time, in no particular order....

You might notice that most of these books are children's books, or that many of them are "firsts." This isn't because I stopped reading good books after childhood, but because for me, the first of a certain type of book was the baseline, compared to every other and therefore the most memorable. Like eating an apple, the first bite is always the best. Also these are definitely not necessarily my favorite books, again, just the most memorable.

1) Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
     I'm starting this list off with Gravity's Rainbow for two reasons: one, I read it relatively recently so it was the first truly impressive work that came to mind, and two, because it blew my mind. Really, truly blew my mind. To shreds. Like a bazooka to a helium balloon. I felt as though I was perpetually scratching away at the tip of an iceberg with a glacier of dense, wordy, witty brilliance extending below my feet. That is, until a few rare glimpses of clarity, when the full force of the work would slap me upside the head and snap everything into focus. I will probably reread that book a dozen times and still not even be close to fully grasping all that Pynchon crunched into it. Really, seriously impressive work.
2) Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
      Of Mice and Men has been a favorite book of mine since I read it at age 13. I've never been as emotionally distraught after finishing a book as I was after George shot Lenny (spoiler alert!), for some reason I just became completely attached to the characters, sympathetic of their situations and understanding of their decisions, heartbreaking as those decisions might have been.
3) Life of Pi, Yann Martel
     Read it when I was 9 and then never again, and it's still one of the only books I'm able to recall almost entirely. I usually have a lot of difficulty remembering details of books, regardless of how much I loved them or how recently I've read them, but every trivial detail of Life of Pi has stuck with me over the 8 year gap since my last reading. The passage where he snaps the turtle's neck, remembering how he was once reluctant to snap a banana open, imagining it to be an animal's neck? Golden.
4) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
     My first of the many Dahl books that filled my childhood, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory always stuck out as a best and a favorite, with Dahl's autobiography as a close second. I can't even begin to guess how many times I read this book, and each re-reading delivers the same dose of whimsical Dahl-goodness.
5) The Secret Garden, Frances Burnett
    First chapter book I ever read, and it was interesting to me because the character with whom I associated the most was the garden itself rather than any of the people. Since it was my first long-ish book, the experience of reading it will always be memorable for me.
7) Redwall and Mattimeo, Brian Jacques
     The TV show on PBS made me really happy, and being a slightly pretentious bookworm child, I was ecstatic when I found out it was based on a book series.
8) Assorted Short Stories: (I love short stories. Good things come in little packages)
     "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"
            Hated this when we were supposed to read it in 7th grade, but now I really love it. Jonathan when he's plummeting into the ocean and nearly dies gets me every time.
     "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"
           Like Of Mice and Men, let me empty and emotionally shaken (but to nowhere near the same degree).
     "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
     "They're Made Out of Meat"
            Not necessarily my favorite story, but really thought provoking and clever. This is one of those stories that you think about at some level on a daily basis
   

      Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.


      And since this not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.


     This is a complete record from the moment it began its life to the moment it ended it.


     Ah...! What's happening? it thought.


     Er, excuse me, who am I?

     Why am I here? What's my purpose in life?


     What do I mean by who am I?

     Calm down, get a grip now...Oh, this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It's a sort of...yawning, tingling sensation in my...my...well I suppose I'd better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let's call it my stomach.


     Good. Ooooh, it's getting quite strong. And hey, what about this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that...wind! Is it a good name? It'll do...perhaps I can find a better name for it when I've found out what it's for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What's this thing? This...let's call it a tale--yeah, tale. Hey! I can really thrash it about pretty good, can't I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn't seem to achieve very much but I'll probably find out what it's for later on. Now, have I built up any coherent picture of things yet?


     No.


     Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out, so much to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with anticipation....


     Or is it the wind?


     There really is a lot of that now, isn't there? 


     And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming toward me very fast? Very, very fast. So big and flat and round, it need a big wide-sounding name like...ow...ound...round...ground! That's a good name--ground!


     I wonder if it will be friends with me?


And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence. 
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


    The above passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (from now on, HHGTTG, because my fingers beg for mercy), does not really illustrate excellent storytelling. In fact, the five-book "trilogy" of which this first titular volume is a part lacks what most would consider to be traits of "good storytelling," such as some sort of profound social commentary, revelation of a universal truth or of a characteristic of human nature, or even the seemingly-necessary convention of plot. Granted, HHGTTG was initially a BBC radio broadcast, which accounts for its light and casual nature, and the collection of novels were adapted from radio and a plethora of other media, contributing to the utter lack of plot consistency or even sense. But somehow, despite the novels' shortcomings in the sanity area, they're still considered classic (in some circles) and still enjoyed by many. That's where the quoted passage above comes in. It's not quoted because it immerses the reader in a rich and vivid scene, because its characters are particularly relatable (though the existential crisis sperm whale is in a place where really all of us have been at some point, without a doubt), or because it conveys some deep and grandiose message that the reader can reflect upon later or post as a Facebook status to impress their friends. It's quoted because it's hilarious. Like the rest of the books, the combination of ridiculousness, improbability, and that oh-so-lovable dry Brit wit dangling loosely from the already loose plot lines are what make HHGTTG a good story. By the end of the five novels, story lines have been thrown about and abruptly ended and characters have been forgotten, but the book is closed with a smile because, hey, that was an enjoyable read. That's what good storytelling is to me, something that will brighten my day just a little bit, even at the expense of a sperm whale or two.