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.