I'll tell you why I hate sleepovers. The last sleepover I went to was one at Marianne's and we were like thirteen years old and we were up to like midnight, and we ended up watching SBS. As you know, NO ONE should watching SBS at that hour unless they like movies that have fifteen different warnings before the movie starts. We accidentally ended up watching Clockwork Orange, which totally freaked me out and scarred me for life. Then Marianne goes "I think the main character is kinda hot" and Lexi says to me "according to the love calculator Alex Burgess and Eliza Boans score 94%" and I was like "he's a murderer okay??" Fast forward three years later and well... I guess God is funny or something.
I woke up in the middle of the night in cold sweat over this memory and I thought I'd hunt out the novel since a) I review, like, classics on this blog and b) I might find some answers and get over something. Maybe.
"What's it going to be then, eh? There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."
Thus begins A Clockwork Orange. It's narrated in Nadsat, which is like the teenspeak of Alex and his friends of that age group and class. At first it's a little hard to understand, cos I think there's like 200 or so words made up for the author for the novel, but after a few pages I found I got right into it. I didn't have to understand every single word to get the gist of it if that makes any sense.
It's about Alex and his friends who like to go out every night wrecking havoc on the town, until one day when Alex tries to assert his authoritayy and his friends decide to bail his out and let him get blamed for murder. Ack. Friends huh? Alex gets shipped off to be rehabilitated and turned into a "good person" and it's this freedom of choice and what is morality that the book centres on.
I know a lot has been made of the violence (which is how I first got introduced to it), but it's also very clever and surprisingly funny. And I mean really, really funny as well. Like when Alex goes into a music shop and it's overrun by kids who are younger than him and they speak in this weirdass language of their own going heee! and they're like, a parody of teenyboppers and they think that Alex is like ancient.
And then there is Alex himself. The anti-hero. He's a murderer, a thug and a rapist. I should hate him, but in a way I found I grew to really relate to him and it wasn't what he did that disgusted me, but what in turn happens to him. There's something heartbreaking in the concept that what goes around, comes around - and when it does, three times harder, it really does hurt.
The final chapter is the most sweetest thing I might have ever read and maybe one of my favorite of all time. It's the "missing chapter" from the movie. In the novel, Alex is back in society and he has a new gang and he's out again doing what he did before, but he's changing. He like thinks to himself "akshully, I'd rather be at home with a cup of tea", which leaves us with the message that you can try to change a person as much as you like, but in the end as they grow up, they change anyway. And that made me think, like, about myself and how things are changing in my own life. I wouldn't mind if I met Alex, he's unapologetic, like me. I'm sure one of us will kill the other.
I thought about this book for a long time; I'm still thinking about it. As you can tell, I'm in a right stroppy-sad mood, but like thoughtful and kinda... emo. Erk. Before you know it I'll stop caring about what I wear and start going around in tutus that look like they're from Pumpkin Patch.
Highly recommended if you can take violence and black humour and are sick of pissy dystopian reads and want like a totes proper dytopian read.
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