# of Words: 623

Should you pay attention to the covers of a number of publications, you know you can (a) get some super-toned arms, (b) start your meditation practice, or (c) transform your home into a clutter-free minimalist paradise. In other words, for the average person, three weeks is sufficient time to either achieve something small or start something bigger.

Evidence #1 that Anthony Burgess is anything but an average human: he wrote his most famous novel in only three weeks.

Evidence #2 that Anthony Burgess is anything but an average individual? The novel he wrote (in only 3 weeks, mind you) is A Clockwork Orange.

This profoundly unsettling masterpiece burst on the scene in 1962, shocking readers because of both its intense violence and its intense brilliance. Before A Clockwork Orange came out, Burgess had been best known for his work as a linguist and because of a "sweetly satiric" trilogy of novels about the end of British Colonialism on the Malay Peninsula.

Yeah. This was the last time anyone would accuse Anthony Burgess of being "sweetly satiric."

Because A Clockwork Orange follows the exploits of Alex, perhaps the very amoral protagonist in literature. This man beats up people for pleasure, steals for fun, drinks drug-laced milk for pleasure, and rapes and murders for pleasure. He's a living nightmare: a bloodthirsty, cruel and demonic child who's finally placed behind bars when his buddies turn on him.

But this is only the halfway point of Alex's twisted saga. He gets put in an experimental treatment program called "the Ludovico technique," where he's brainwashed into feeling profound nausea whenever he's subjected to anything violent. This has the effect of turning a previously dangerous offender into a risk-averse shadow of his former self--in actuality, he's so physically revolted by the idea of violence that he'd rather suffer himself than put anyone in harm's way.

In other words: he has lost his free will.

And believe it or not, the fact that Anthony Burgess produced a philosophical parable about modern ethics is only one of the two chief reasons A Clockwork Orange is indeed crazy-brilliant. The other reason is that Burgess created a new dialect: Alex and his friends speak "nadsat" a Russian-influenced slang that is so pervasive (and, frankly, therefore hard to understand) that many copies of A Clockwork Orange include a glossary.

Of course, we can't talk about the heritage of A Clockwork Orange without mentioning the thing that imprinted that name into the collective consciousness: Stanley Kurbick's 1971 film version. Maybe you've even sat down and seen the whole thing. In this book, it's a brilliant movie, and one worthy of Burgess' novel.

But Burgess had other thoughts. In fact, he hated the film so much that he desired he's never written the book in the first place:

We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I'm best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate [...] it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I must not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.

Lucky for us, though, you can't unring a bell...and you can't unwrite a book, especially not one as notoriously genius as A Clockwork Orange. Even in the event that you forget Kubrick's movie version (that's, um, hard to do) A Clockwork Orange still has a location on Modern Library's 100 Best Novels record and Time's "Best English-Language Novels Published Since 1923.

And it's safe to say that Burgess gets the gold medal for "Best Achievement Completed In Three Weeks."

Related Papers

Glengarry Glen Ross David Mamet

Sure, observing someone stab another person at the trunk or seeing him skirt the legislation could be interesting, but toss a little competition from the combination, and things could get downright thrilling. This is the form of planet David Mamet is known for producing--a world filled with conflict and tension in which folks behave badly, and we as the audience only get to sit back and appreciate. Wait--did you think it was all just driving around and showing individuals fine homes? Nope. That......Read More

Great Expectations Charles Dickens

One chilly and misty evening, a tiny boy meets an escaped offender on the marshes near England's coast. No, it is not the launching of a TV crime drama (though it may be)--it is the beginning of one of Charles Dickens' most renowned novels: Good Expectations. With two chapters Weekly, Great Expectations (along with other serialized novels like it) were as close as Victorian England got to Breaking Bad or Mad Men. People waited patiently each week to the next "incident" to arrive at the......Read More

Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell

You can not get Gone With the Wind into Short. It's enormously--perhaps even ridiculously--long. Seriously: The only real difference on the planet that can contain this beast of a book is probably the Coco de Mer. Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel is a terrific, sweeping tale about the catastrophe of the Civil War, the end of civilization as the South's known it, and love turned to dust. It is, in short, a book in which everything goes horribly wrong. You'd think that as long and as tragic as......Read More

Related Topics