A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: RASSOODOCK GOVOREET FOR FOXCROFT DEVOTCHKAS

Welcome to the Korova Milkbar

Anthony Burgess knew not what he was doing when he created the futuristic and dark novel, A Clockwork Orange in 1963. The world was hardly ready for his seemingly dark, nihilistic vision of the fate of man, and it is debatable whether we can see past it even in this new century. Burgess admitted that "It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers." (CO, p.xiv)

This work has been controversial from the beginning, and the film version was picketed and accused of being pornographic. His title comes from London slang and was used to indicate something that was at the extreme of weirdness, odd or inverted to an outlandish degree, and the reader can certainly understand this once she has met Alex and his vecks.

While the reader must slog through a horribly bleak vista of cold impersonal urban landscape and wretched inhumanity unleashed by both the boys and society, she can also reach for the beauty and possibility which are dangled mischievously next to the vicious shenanigans of the devilish droogs and the mindless oppression of the "man." As a contemporary critic indicated "Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty little shocker, but is really that rare thing in English letters: a philosophical novel.