‘Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.’ So says the prison chaplain, perhaps the only voice of reason in Anthony Burgess’s most celebrated work. Both a horrific satire of youth culture and an ingenious examination of social justice and government control, A Clockwork Orange has left an indelible, boot-shaped mark on the popular and literary culture of the late 20th century. Stanley Kubrick’s notorious 1971 film — with its iconic imagery and enduring controversies — has overshadowed a work whose philosophical paradoxes and astonishing linguistic invention are some of literature’s most inspired.
Alex, ‘Your Humble Narrator’, and his droogs terrorise a nightmarish London of the near future. He describes his life of ‘britvas’ (razors) and ‘twenty- to-one’ (fun / gang violence) in Nadsat, an idiom fusing Cockney rhyming slang, corrupted Russian and invented polyglot constructions. The language is spellbinding, often Joycean: ‘trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed’. As introducer Irvine Welsh writes, ‘the “Nadsat” spoken by Alex does more than draw readers to admire his linguistic craft: it compels them to traverse the mechanics of their own comprehension’.
This edition follows the restored text of 2012, which includes the 21st chapter excluded from early US editions of the book. Also featured here is an expanded glossary, compiled with reference to Burgess’s handwritten notes and letters to his editors. Comprehensive notes from Burgess’s biographer Andrew Biswell explore allusions in the text, including references to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The binding simulates alligator skin, while Ben Jones’s sinister collage illustrations are reminiscent of cautionary fairy tales.
