A Clockwork Orange by Anthony BurgessMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book... maybe it was all the rage back when it was first published, but to me it's just a poor man's 1984 with less powerful social commentary and a lack of a good plot and a satisfying resolution. It seems to be a companion book to 1984 in the way that it attempts to portray what the state (a repressive one but that never feels totalitarian, just sort of fascist but not powerfully stated) or society, does to a boy. But the story is not as powerful as it could be because you don't feel that Alex is a product of his particular society. He's just a punk, a thug, a stupid violent boy. The story doesn't really attempt to show why he's like that, so he can be considered an anomaly. In that way, he doesn't work as a character you can project things onto, not because he's irreedeemable (no one is), but because you don't get a sense of what drives him, beyond the most basic impulses.
Burgess attempts to solve that at the end, but the ending itself is not satisfying. Just a mellowing of the character and a 'falling into' conformity that doesn't ring true because it happens in a couple of pages with no catalyst or anything that resembles character development. If the character hasn't shown that aspect of himself before and there's no incident that prods him to grow up, it doesn't seem believable. He was a prick, why would he stop being one all of a sudden?
I suppose it works better as a parable of youth and growing up than as a societal parody or the big antisocial manifesto some people try to make it out to be. It's not. It's not a good enough piece of art for that.
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