A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
This book was really exhausting to read, despite its short length. While the slang did add somewhat to the world building, and I did feel smart when I eventually decoded it via context clues, most of the time I just ended up glossing over entire paragraphs because half the words were things I didn't understand. And when I did understand what the narrator was referring to, I kind of wish I hadn't. I know that that's the point of the book - ultra-violence and discussions about free will - but I can't help but feel like it was handled in poor taste. What most of my problems come down to is that I didn't like the main character.
The book comes really close to having some interesting conversations about free will and goodness, but those conversations are relegated to single sentences from inconsequential side characters. The vast majority of the book is spent reading a monologue from the main character, who doesn't have much to add to the conversation. Sure he believes his rehabilitation was a bad thing, but that's obvious - he's predisposed to horrible violence and was given a treatment that made it impossible for him to act on those desires, so of course he wouldn't like it. Sure the treatment might have been inhumane, but I didn't exactly feel sorry for the character. I think there was an interesting idea in there, but the unlikable and unsympathetic single protagonist really got in the way of that.
[SPOILERS] And by the end of the book it feels like it was all for nothing, because the narrator was miraculously hypnotized between chapters to be cured and he went right back to his old ways. I did like the final chapter when he decides on his own that it's time to clean up his act and start a family, but even that felt unsatisfying. Sure, it was his own decision, but at no point did the narrator ever feel remorse for his actions in the first act of the book. When he does finally decide to leave his life of crime, it's simply because he feels like he's too old to enjoy that kind of thing anymore, at the ripe old age of 18. There is no mention for the people he had hurt in the past, and even worse many of them were punished for still hating the narrator after he was released from prison. It isn't a satisfying ending at all, really. [END SPOILERS]
I can handle a book that is halfway written in made-up slang, but I draw the line at a book full of half-baked ideas about free will and the government that doesn't take the time to actually explore them. This book may present some interesting ideas, but it does just that: it brings them up in passing, but that's it. Any characters with a strong moral opposition to what was done to the main character beyond "it sucks that this happened to me" get such minuscule roles in the story that they're barely worth bringing up. This book takes no time at all to critically explore its core ethical dilemma from more than one very biased perspective, and I think it really suffers for that.
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