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A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Anthony Burgess'
Critics Corner: Then & Now
". . . Burgess was a victim of circumstance rather than a free agent. A Catholic upbringing, a sense of sin; a wartime engaged in educationally disseminated reform; financial success; a desire to flee a form of socialism of which the most visible sign was a 90 per cent rate of income tax; a wish to retain the structurally conservative model of Englishness in which he had been educated, combined with a willingness to value linguistic experimentation as a substitute for systematic social reform: these are the intellectual foundations that give us A Clockwork Orange, which, with its wildly innovative vocabulary and its venomous hostility towards any kind of state-based attempts to reform the individual, is by no means as peripheral to the Burgess canon as he wanted it to be."
COLLIN BURROWS, "NOT QUITE NASTY," London Review of Books, 2/9/06 (a review of Andrew Biswell's biography The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, 2005)
"Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums."
THEODORE DALRYMPLE, "A PROPHETIC AND VIOLENT MASTERPIECE," City Journal, Winter 2006
"When, in 1960, Anthony Burgess sat down to write 'A Clockwork Orange,' we may be pretty sure that he had a handful of certainties about what lay ahead of him. He knew the novel would be set in the near future (and that it would take the standard science-fictional route, developing, and fiercely exaggerating, current tendencies). He knew his vicious antihero, Alex, would narrate, and that he would do so in an argot or idiolect the world had never heard before (he eventually settled on a blend of Russian, Romany and rhyming slang). He knew it would have something to do with Good and Bad, and Free Will. And he knew, crucially, that Alex would harbor a highly implausible passion: an ecstatic love of classical music."
MARTIN AMIS, "THE SHOCK OF THE NEW: 'A CLOCKWORK ORANGE' AT 50," New York Times, 8/31/12
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