by Anthony Burgess
It is necessary for there to be no organisation that actually opposes the violence because the point of the novel is to explore the situation that can lead to such violence, as well as the rationality of the violence itself. Alex lives in the moment - he presents no memory of his past and has no thoughts of his future; his violence requires no justification for him as he is detached from ideas of justice and consequence. The moment that he grows up and thinks of his actions in a reasonable sense is the moment the novel has to end.
Very often the purpose of science fiction is that the futuristic setting is used to present an extreme situation - taking something latent in society now and providing it with a timeframe with which it can grow and take over. Burgess apparently does this with his novel, presenting an extreme-socialist welfare state, but whether it's actually in the future seems irrelevant to him. A Clockwork Orange seems to take place in more of an alternate place, a constructed world where Burgess is free to make the point he wants to make. The indifferent Alex is a product of self-centred political factions not qualitatively better than any other, whose ends-justify-the-means attitude allows them all to commit atrocities. Much like in The Picture Of Dorian Gray or Marlowe's Tamburlaine the reader feels sympathy for Alex by dint of there being no "good" character to provide the standard focal point of loyalty.
The Ludovico Technique and Alex subsequent treatment at the hands of its opponents show in microcosm the social system that leads Alex to rebel. The Technique is an example of spin eerily recognisable forty-four years on: a quick fix dressed up as a miracle cure. To the extreme left-wing government the people are important but the person matters little, and the morality of what they do to Alex is of little consequence compared to their utilitarian philosophy of keeping crime rates down. The technique is shown to be a fallacy anyway: it in no way prevents Alex's violent desires, but it simply prevents him from acting on them - he isn't transformed into a better person. All he wants is "to be normal and healthy as I was in the starry days, having my malenky bit of fun with real droogs and not those who just call themselves that and are really more like traitors" (121)*. He hates the sickness but it in no way encourages him to stop doing what he wants to do. The leopard can't change its spots, as it were.
It is significant that it is only after both the Ludovico Technique and its opponents have failed that Alex truly grows up, demonstrating that artificial conditioning is ultimately no substitute for natural human growth - although this itself has a darker subtext in suggesting that every new young generation is doomed to experience it too, and every older generation will be terrorised in their turn.
If the novel has a flaw it's that it is no more than a platform for the message, making the formal experimentation ("How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou" (14)) seem rather surplus to requirements. In all though, despite its bluntness this is a deceptively subtle and nuanced tale that's well worth a read.
Overall: *****
*Page references come from the Penguin Modern Classics edition.
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