A Clockwork Orange is not something for the young ones. At best, it's for teens and above.
This is a title I'd heard of a number of times but never actually read. It's one of those titles that sticks with you because it's so unusual. What is a "clockwork orange" anyway? The text never comes right out and tells you, so I'll give you a general idea.
A clockwork orange doesn't exist. It would be a strange, weird, unusual kind of thing if it did. The main character of the book, Alex, is the clockwork orange.
I'll give you a fairly brief summary of the plot, since my guess is that many of you haven't read it either, O my brothers. (If you have read it, you know where that last bit comes from.)
Before I get to the plot summary, you should know that the entire book is written with Alex as Your Humble Narrator. Since he speaks in an unusual street slang, you have to constantly be translating the text into English you can understand.
For example, here is a typical sentence Narrator Alex would speak.
"They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg."
Got that, my droogs?
Alex and his three droogs (friends - in this case, fellow hoodlums and gang members) terrorized whomever they wanted, just for the fun of it - and sometimes the money. One time Alex accidentally went too far and ended up killing someone. He was sent to prison. He was 15 or 16 at the time.
After 2 years, he volunteered for a new program that would let him out of prison after 2 weeks. The program involved doctors giving him an experimental drug and treating him with experimental techniques that would cause him physical pain if he ever tried to commit the crimes he and his droogs were accustomed to.
The program worked - sorta. Alex lost his free will. His family rejected him. His friends had moved on. (One was dead.) The police (one, a former droog) didn't believe him and beat him up. Eventually, he tried to commit suicide by jumping out a window, but he survived.
While recuperating in the hospital, the doctors treated him so that he came back to normal, with a free will. In the end, he grew up and became a decent young man of 18.
A movie has been made of this book, but it leaves out the last chapter (21) in which Alex really grows up. Some copies of the book drop the last chapter too. If you decide to read this, be sure to get a 21-chapter edition. (I did, obviously.)
This was a pretty horrorshow book. If you can wrap your gulliver around all the translating you need to do and the plot summary you viddied above didn't scare you away, you might enjoy this read.
