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One of Esquire's 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time “A brilliant novel.… [A] savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds.”―New York TimesIn Anthony Burgess’s influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends’ intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess’s introduction, “A Clockwork Orange Resucked.” 6 illustrations Read more
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date : May 21, 2019
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 0393341763
ISBN-13 : 68
Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.3 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #6,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #100 in Dystopian Fiction (Books) #229 in Classic Literature & Fiction #782 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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Top Amazon Reviews
And so I sit here, struck by literary genius, O my brothers. I must tell you I have indulged in this book perhaps more than any of you, unless you're Russian also. My native language intertwined with this astounding work of brilliant horror, coloring it rich and scary and crazy at the same time, with me imagining it as it was spoken, properly. Brrrrr. I feel like there is the voice of Anthony Burgess in my head, reciting as Alex. I must tell you one more thing, before I go on. I have read the version with the 21st chapter, the very end that's been cut off in the original American publication, but was kept in the British, hence the review might differ from the version that didn't have it. You see, Alex changed, as impossible as it might have seem, he did change in that last 21st chapter, and indeed it changed the story itself. There is hope, after all, for the Alexes of the world. Makes you wonder, doesn't, what kind of decision made it cut from the American version in the first place. But I'm getting carried away into mundane. Now, I must say, this will be the book to re-read and to re-read and to re-read, among such works of genius as Lolita, War and Peace, and the like. I've never read Burgess before, and I plan on indulging more and more in his work in coming years, because, oh well, because the explosion of the beautiful and the appalling, the sophisticated and the primitive strikes such a fine balance, that you feel it, you smell it, you taste it, you hear it, you see it like it's unfolding around you, and you unfold around it, and inside it, and all is in and out and together, and you raise your head from the book to answer that call and you no longer know who you are or why or where. Last time a new writer had such an impact on me it was Haruki Murakami with 1Q84. I can't say wow, because it sounds boring. Let me try. It will deposit fireworks in your brain. It will skin you and pin you with sharp words all real proper. It will put you in a mind of one you don't want to be yet feel for by the end of the book, unsure how it happened. Namely, little Alex. Little Alex. Little Alex has a proper mum and pop, lives in a proper flat, in a proper block, all good. But it's not enough for little Alex. Little Alex likes to perform a bit of ultra-violence every night with his droogs, but it's just simple bloodletting, oh no. It's more sophisticated than that. Alex has wit, Alex is fond of classical music, Alex adds the disturbing twist to his crimes, and that, only at 15. He does everything there is to try, the beating, the cutting, the raping, the stealing, until one day he stumbles on killing, and that's a slippery slope that leads him to an institution where some very interesting new curing methods are tried on him, and lo and behold, I can't tell you no more as otherwise I will spoil it for you, in case you happened to have been untouched by this story, wether in book or film shape. Anyway. It all turns around, of course, as things do in life. Those who do crimes, pay for their crimes, but who is to judge what is fair? How much do you pay, and when can we stop the punishment? I know there have been horsed of scholars who said smart things about this book and about life and people at large and how it relates, but on my level I can tell you that the coin has always two sides, and we may forever wonder if what the author was trying to say, but I have a feeling that is wasn't simple glorifying of sex and violence, as it might seem. Oh no. It's about "Why?", and about "Why not?" Why do we have violence and those who enjoy it? Because those who do it can tell you, why not? When we're blind as to why we shouldn't, we do it just because we can, don't we? We do until we get caught. That's how we learn. Some earlier, some later. Alex does learn, eventually, but at a cost. Okay, I need to shut up now otherwise this will turn into an essay. Go read it. It will, literally, blow your mind.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2014 by Ksenia Anske
"The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within, 6655321. Goodness is something **chosen**. **When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man**." When I reached this passage in Anthony Burgess' *A Clockwork Orange*, I immediately recognized it as one of the most (if not the most) important message among the many in this intriguing, fast-paced novel (it is then reinforced later on in the novel by the author/victim F. Alexander). Also present in Kubrick's film, but not stated with the same emphasis and strength, it comes from the 'rot of the Staja's charlie' (or, translating from Nadstad--the slang used by teenagers in Burgess' futuristic dystopian England--"the prison's chaplain's mouth") and tells everything: this book is about free will. To be honest, I've never been much interested in the fortuitous, ultra-violent concept behind Kubrick's film (which I had never seen before finishing the book this week), but decided to give the book a shot after learning about its intricate linguistic complexities, by incidentally reading the 'Translator's Notice' in the most recent Brazilian translation (Fabio Fernandes for publisher Aleph). There, Fernandes enthusiastically go over each of the main devices used by Burgess to create a sense of strangeness in the dystopic future of ACWO and how he as a translator dealt with them: the Russian-derived words in nadsat ('horrorshow'/хорошо for excellent, 'rot'/рот for mouth, 'rooker'/руки for hands, 'litso'/лицо for face, 'malenky'/маленький for little or tiny, 'devotchka'/девочка for girl, 'veshch'/вещь for thing and so on), the childish rhyming slang (like kids talking cute in words like 'skoliwoll', 'gutiwutis', 'eggiweg') and the pompous sort-of-shakespearean discourse (filled with thus's, thou's and thine's). All of that made me start reading the Brazilian translation in Portuguese and the original English version simulteaneously. But soon I felt comfortable moving on only with the original, having a nadsat glossary at hand just not to lose track of anything. Actually, as soon as I made it through the surf of the nadsat, just like in Joyce's *Ulysses* (and Burgess as a linguist was a devoted Joycian), ACWO turned into a very entertaining journey because it is so fast-paced. However, the comparison with Joyce's can't go much beyond the surface of the linguistic mimicking, because Burgess himself admitted in life that he wrote ACWO in a hurry (scholars now say he wrote the book in 18 months, but Burgess himself used to brag he did it in just three weeks because he needed the money). Actually, all Nadsat, the childish rhyming slang and the sort-of-shakesperean discourse seemed to me to be rather gross stylistic shortcuts, like finding a solution to create this sense of strangeness of the dystopic future quickly (it certainly makes it easier to establish that all Nadsat comes from anglicized Russian, but why would it be that way?--was there a time when England was under Russian command?). The same can be said about Alex's pompous Shakespearean tone--it is cool, but it is there just because it is cool, no matter how hard it is to explain in the context of the novel why is that. Differently from the Kubrick's film, 'Your Humble Narrator' Alex is, at the beginning of the novel, only a 15-year-old violent teenager who actually comes from a (presumably) stable family--which maybe could help explain how he had the chance to know so much about classical music and develop his devotion to "Ludwig van", although all references to classical music in the novel seem to be, as Nadsat and Shakespeare, stylistic shortcuts as well. In any event, Alex's story goes on for more or less three years, and that is what makes the whole difference with Kubrick's movie (and indeed caused Burgess himself to depricate it), as clearly Malcolm McDowell was not only much older (isn't that something that happens with all adaptations of Hamlet to the screen as well?) but also out-of-placedly immature. I must confess I was completely 'nagoy' about the controversy surrounding the last, 21st chapter. All I can say is that, at first, it really came to me as a blatantly sarcastic detour. It was like the book was moving in one direction and all of sudden it moved almost 180 degrees around. Until the end, I was eagerly waiting for a plot twist that would put it back on track, but that was a hope slowly vanished as the unread pages diminished. So all I had as a console was the prison's chaplain's phrase: if Alex couldn't choose, he wouldn't be free, so he had to learn by himself what goodness was really all about. It is a sort of naïve idea that maybe was needed in the 1960s when Burgess wrote the book, but an idea that didn't age well. That is not what you could say about the rest of the book, which not only didn't age, it became so fluid with our own reality that it has, sadly enough, fallen almost into our everyday triviality.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2024 by Regis
One of the most fascinating dystopian novels on the par with George Orwell's "1984." Although the superficial perusal may reveal simply a complex plot involving evel-ish protagonist -- "Little Alex," a somewhat deeper look at the author and social issues involved at the time of the novel's writing will reveal a complex lace of multiple subplots and ideas. Something to consider: for a long time Anthony Burgess was a member of Her Majesty's Secret Service. Despite long assignments to Far East and Middle Eastern countries, Anthony Burgess' specialty was Eastern Europe and Slavic languages. Hence the language of the "hood" in this novel: "Nadzet" -- translated as "teen." (e.g. triNADZAT' " = 13; chetirNADZAT'= 14, etc...). Why do the major characters speak this lingo? Well the simple answer is that they are teenagers themselves. Hence the angst, aggressiveness, unbridled sexuality, the ugly behaviour, etc... Something else to consider: why pepper the novel with Slavonic root-words? Why not use Arabic, French, or German? Possible answer: To those "in the know," it may have looked as if there may have been a small but real chance that good old England may go Red (Philby, Burgess (different and unrelated Guy Burgess), and McLean have just defected [not in that order, of course]; the students and the unions are taking over the streets; Soviets are going into space and are arming every anti-colonial movement possible; etc, etc, etc.) As a specialist on Eastern Europe, Burgess had deep knowledge of miserable life behind the Iron Curtain, which he masterfully recreated in and transposed upon Great Britain in the "Clockwork." Trivia 1: it is rumored that while posted in Egypt, Burgess had a nervous breakdown. This led to his resignation from working for the Crown and the beginning of his literary career (this was brought up in several media interviews with the author later in his writing career). Trivia 2: the original printing of the book differed greatly between the US and the UK versions as the American Version lacked the final chapter of the book! It is unclear why, but the readers in the U.S. had to wait until 1972 to read the book in full. Trivia 3: the superb film adaption of the plot by Stanley Kubrick (the one that stars young Malcolm McDowell in the title role) was based on the American and NOT UK version, therefore it (the movie) lacks an absolutely key point of the book obvious to the reader in the last chapter of the original "Clockwork Orange." Trivia 4: No connection was ever made between Guy Burgess (the Secret Service man who defected to the USSR) and Anthony Burgess (Secret Service man who had a nervous breakdown and then wrote this book). As far as I know not even the most paranoid counterintel John Bull has ever raised that question. Hm... Now that I see it written down,,, I wonder... Overall, this is one of my most favourite books ever!
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Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2013 by Tired Parent
As described!
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2026 by andy
Lets start with the book--"A Clockwork Orange." Anthony Burgess grew to hate this book, not because of its contents , but because it so overshadowed all of his other works. Burgess was a man of divers interests which he wrote about in both fiction and nonfiction. He was a superb writer. Words, for him, seemed to come easily. I must say, Burgess deserves mention as a sociological Jules Verne, a man who made stark predictions of future turns that have panned out. In "A Clockwork Orange," which he wrote fairly early in life, he created a deeply disturbing world in which young teens run free to commit violent crimes of all kinds at night. The opening pages of this book are filled with gang fights, muggings, rape, beatings, burglary, and car theft. Alex, the protagonist of this first-person narration, never shows even a smidgen of remorse about the crimes he has committed. He simply relates his tale, including a scene in which he rapes two girls he estimates to be pre-teen. The only violence the sociopathic Alex regards as problematic is violence against him. In the story, he is arrested and eventually introduced into an experimental new program that uses drugs and hypnotics to make people incapable of violence. Note, this does not mean he sees it as wrong, just that he cannot become violent without being sickened. He is a cat without claws or teeth that is placed back in a world filled with enemies (many of whom are the good people he tortured) and the results are as cruel as he is. The story is simple, the telling is sublime. Alex speaks "Nadsat," a slang language of Burgess's creation that mixes Russian words, rhyme, and English slang. A good portion of the novel is told in these words, so the reader needs to pay careful attention in the beginning, learn a new vocabulary, and apply that vocabulary to every paragraph. In my case, I was not a reader but a listener, and that enhanced the experience greatly. It enhanced the experience largely do to the amazing talents of Tom Hollander, a gifted character actor who injects so much into this book. You may know Hollander. He played the parson Mr. Collins in "Pride and Prejudice" and the officious Cutler Beckett in the second and third "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. He generally plays the short guy with the big ego. If I had his reading ability, I'd have an ego the size of a mountain. Hollander adds a brash, boastful, cockney attitude to Alex. His range of voices and characters seems endless as he brings old men, politicians, prisoners. thugs, policemen, prison guards, priests, and psychologists to life. There have been a few perfect pairings of reader and text. If you try this audio book and agree with me, you might also want to listen to "The Anansi Boys" as read by Lenny Henry; "Memoirs of a Geisha," read by Bernadette Dunne--there are other productions of "Memoirs" with readers. I can neither recommend nor criticize other versions as I have not heard--I highly recommend holding out for Ms. Dunne's reading; and "The Green Mile" and "Freaky Deaky" read by Frank Muller.
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Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2011 by Steven L. Kent
I suspect that 95% of those familiar with A Clockwork Orange have seen the Stanley Kubrick motion picture, as opposed to read the rather short novel written by Anthony Burgess. It had been a long time since I'd seen the movie (25-30 years), so aside from a broad remembrance of Malcolm McDowell raising holy hell and undergoing "reconditioning", I remembered little of the story. In fact, in an introduction to the 1986 edition of the work, Burgess explains that previous American editions, as well as the Kubrick film, neglected to include the 21st chapter of the story. MILD SPOILERS, FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH THE STORY The story is set in a near future dystopia, in which our humble narrator, Alex, epitomizes the rampant lawlessness and thuggery of society. After several instances of extreme antisocial behavior, he is arrested, convicted and incarcerated. Faced with political backlash as a result of the high crime rate, the powers that be have concocted an effective rehabilitation technique to combat recidivism. Alex is the perfect lab rat for the new technique, which utilizes harsh negative reinforcement to forestall even the thought of violence. Effectively cured, he is released into society, where he becomes an unwilling tool for both the current administration as well as its opponents. At issue is the morality of the treatment itself. As the prison chaplain opines: "It may not be nice to be good Alex. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, Alex." And later, a former victim of Alex's wrongdoing states, "They always bite off too much. But the essential intention is the real sin. A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man." In any event, after a political struggle, Alex's conditioning is reversed. The previously omitted 21st chapter deals with Alex's free choice to be good or be bad, and the inclusion of this chapter, in effect, changes the entire book, in my opinion. No review can be complete without reference to the style of language used throughout the novel. A mixture of English and Russian (referred to as nadsat) serves as the dialect for the teenage punks of the era. While slightly offputting at first, the meaning can be easily discerned through context, except on rare occasions such as the following: "This evening at the Korova there was a fair number of vecks and ptitsas and devotchkas and malchicks smecking and peeting away, and cutting through their govoreeting and the burbling of the in-the-landers with their `Gorgor fallatuke and the worm sprays in filltip slaughterballs' and all that cal you could slooshy a popdisc on the stereo, this being Ned Achimota singing `That Day, Yeah, That Day'." Enjoy.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2010 by Steven M. Anthony
AP LIT SQUAD 2015 -- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess was an interesting book to read, to say the least. The combination of sex, violence, criminal activity, and teenage drinking makes for an entertaining novel that definitely captures the attention of the reader. Anthony Burgess effectively uses the life of Alex and his droogs, or group of friends, to portray the evil existing in our society, and a failed attempt at reforming the evil out of youth. By incorporating the government into the plot, Burgess writes a thorough, scarily realistic story concerning the evils in our world. A major aspect of this book was Burgess’s choice to write from Alex’s perspective. Instead of a third-person viewpoint, the author puts us in the criminal’s shoes and lets the reader understand the crime, rape, and thievery from the one leading these delinquencies. This point of view gives the reader a more personal connection to Alex both when he is committing crimes as well as when he is tortured by the treatment. The author also gives us access to Alex’s motives and feelings before, during, and after his jail time and subsequent treatment. One of the unique characteristics of this book is the constant inclusion of slang – a foreign language spoken by Alex and his gang. Since the book is written from Alex’s perspective, the reader can see how he and his posse communicate in their own semi-foreign language, symbolizing the teenagers’ disconnect from the rest of society. Words such as “droogs,” “moloko,” “horrorshow,” and “viddy” are common language in the book, as this is how Alex and his gang communicate during their criminal actions. Even after his treatment, Alex continues to use this same language, symbolizing the limits of the attempted reformation, as not all of Alex’s past identity could be eradicated. The controversy regarding this book comes in the conclusion, in which two different versions were published. While the American publishing ended with the twentieth chapter, Burgess intended there to be a twenty-first chapter, as published in the United Kingdom. This controversial twenty-first chapter tells of how Alex is beginning to grow tired of violence, especially when he runs into his old droog Pete who is at this point a married working man. Alex begins to think of a normal life with children of his own, suggesting the possibility of an end to his criminal ways. It is no coincidence that this is Chapter 21, with 21 being an age usually associated with the coming of age and becoming an adult. This final chapter brings into question whether the reforming treatment has a remaining impact on Alex, or if he is beginning to mature, and this character development was inevitable with or without the treatment. Overall, Anthony Burgess crafted an entertaining, thought-provoking novel in A Clockwork Orange. This book was a joy for our group to read, and its literary merit provides an underlying meaning to the engaging storyline.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2015 by Amazon Customer
Anthony Burgess wrote his most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, in 1962. When Burgess wrote his book, the violent, God forsaken world he wrote about was in the near future (I'm guessing around 1995, since Alex and his droogs at one point go joyriding in a "Durango 95"). Burgess was apparently a rather keen sociological observer, and most readers will conclude that there was a lot of accurate prediction in what he wrote. The book is narrated by Alex, an oddly lovable amoral teenage thug. Alex uses "nadsat," a slang derived mostly from Slavic languages, and this language makes Alex's world more real for the reader. This language is mostly comprehensible from context, and there are several glossaries on the internet. His language has great comic effect throughout the book, as when Alex reads some propaganda in a government newspaper: "This gazetta I had seemed to be like a Government gazetta, for the only news that was on the front page was about the need for every veck to make sure he put the Government back in again on the next General Election, which seemed to be about two or three weeks off. There were very boastful slovos about what the Government had done, brothers, in the last year or so, what with increased exports and a real horrorshow foreign policy, and all that cal." Or when he describes a bit of refuse on the floor of a milk bar: "I had my glazzies like fixed on a malenky bit of silver paper from a cancer packet that was on the floor, the sweeping-up of this mesto not being all that horrorshow, brothers." Much of the humor in the book comes from the contrast between the horrible things that Alex does and his unshakable self-esteem. It never occurs to Alex that the reader's sympathies might not be completely with him as he rapes and murders and plots and schemes. And Alex is so buoyant and resourceful that it's hard not to root for him. But Burgess didn't write this book simply to draw attention to an alarming increase in juvenile delinquency. The central struggle in the book is between the little man and the soul-stealing bureaucracy. In one soliloquy, Alex tells us "They of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to." The government tries to make Alex good but of course it can't: Alex has to choose to be good, or not. The 1987 Norton edition restores a final chapter that had been deleted from the original American edition of the novel, and it is here that the reader sees why all men are equal, in God's eyes: everyone has a potential as well as a past, and no man can say what another man will become.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2006 by -_Tim_-