The point of it, I think, is to anchor Alexâ€™s youth, what with each generation having its own slang that the generations before and after struggle to understand. I speak Polish and once learned a bit of Russian, so I had no trouble understanding nadsat for the most part. The movie adaptation is also spot on, keeping most of the original elements of the story in place and even keeping the ending firmly there.ĭefinitely my final rating has to be a 4/5. I really enjoyed reading it, even though I did need the help of the glossary sometimes to make sense of the vaguely-Russian-inspired words in the text. He may not be a very likable character in terms of morality, but you do end up liking him because heâ€™s just such a damn good sweet talker sometimes. Alex is a brilliant character, and weâ€™re lucky that we get all of the story in the first-person, meaning that weâ€™re privy to his thoughts, desires, and plans. This book really zeroes in on the issues of free will and society put together, taking it to the extreme and showing us what happens when we try to change human nature, or if it really can ever change. However, Alex soon falls victim to the law, and becomes part of a program designed to rehabilitate people like him into society by removing their need to commit violent acts. He takes pride in this, and throughout the first part of the book is seen to revel in the violence that he sows around him. In fact, he is the leader of a gang of ruffians â€“ 3 of his so-called friends who follow him and his orders. The basic idea here is that, in a dystopian future where Russia became a major world power (or rather the USSR), England became a place that adopted some rather strange words into their vocabulary that, upon further inspection, you can see to be coming from Russian origin.Īlex is a very violent and troubled youth who seems to find no problems with rape, drug use, attacking people for sport, and other activities that you would associate with gangs. The main character, Alex, is a youth (I would say not even in his twenties yet) who lives in a version of the United Kingdom (I think it might be London, but correct me if Iâ€™m wrong) that has been taken over by some kind of Soviet power. I must warn you though, it will ruin the song â€˜Singing in the Rainâ€™ for you forever, as it did to me. Iâ€™m sure you must have heard of the movie, and if you havenâ€™t you should really get onto watching that movie.

But before we delve into the book itself, Iâ€™d just like to point out that Anthony Burgess used to live in Malta and that he left because the clergy pissed him off, and if that isnâ€™t one of the funniest things Iâ€™ve ever heard I donâ€™t know what is. This book is probably a classic, and one that I think a lot of people should read.

A clockwork orange publisher