Fans of Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED will no doubt disagree with me here, but _A Clockwork Orange_ may be the most remarkable man-against-the-State novella ever published. Anthony Burgess's approach is in one significant sense the opposite of Rand's: where she tried to project a hero (and in my opinion failed; John Galt seems to be little more than a one-dimensional abstraction), Burgess projects a thoroughly depraved teenager and forces us to root for him anyway. It's not every author who can make you watch a bunch of gratuitous sex'n'violence and _then_ conclude that even great moral depravity trumps behavioristic psychology and mechanistic determinism.

What "protagonist" (or Your Humble Narrator, at any rate) Alex does in the first half of the novel will make you ill. But what the State does to him to "cure" him makes his nadsat gang violence seem almost . . . well, "innocent" isn't quite the right word, but the fact that I'm even thinking of that word is an indication of Anthony Burgess's power.

For Burgess, the important thing is moral choice, and the possibility of choice entails the possibility of evil. Once Alex has been "reformed" by the very latest techniques of behavioristic science, it's no longer even _possible_ for him to be moral -- and that's somehow more horrible than any of his own horrible acts.

But Burgess stops short of making volition an object of idolatry. In the first place, he doesn't make any argument that Alex's actions were somehow "good" merely because he had _chosen_ them; quite the contrary. In the second place, even though Alex bears the full blame for all his depraved actions, there are hints scattered throughout the novella that if he weren't living in a "socialist paradise," he just wouldn't have been acting this way in the first place. (For example, both his parents are required by law to work full-time. They also seem curiously unwilling to discipline their son, or even inquire what it is he does when he goes out at night.)

I read this book twenty years ago in an edition that had something this one lacked: a glossary. I thought I was going to miss it, but I didn't; Burgess is a fine writer and anticipates his readers' needs very nicely. If the meaning of one of his Russian-import slang terms isn't obvious from context, he works in a definition. (And there are a few glossaries available online anyway.)

The earlier edition also lacked something this one has: a twenty-first chapter. I hadn't read this before -- it was left out of the American edition of the book and therefore out of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation as well -- but to my mind it makes a better ending for the book.

Sure, as Burgess himself admits, it's a little crude; we never actually _see_ Alex develop into an adult, we just suddenly learn at the end that he's growing up and becoming ashamed of his past actions. But the novel wouldn't be complete if Burgess hadn't introduced that final bit of irony: after all the State's torturous efforts to "reform" the poor misguided youth, in the end he just sort of, well, gets over it.

Other readers may have different opinions -- and according to Burgess's delightfully snarky introduction of 1986, that's okay with him. And he almost sounds resigned to the fact (for it probably is a fact) that of all his thirty-two novels -- not to mention his nonfiction (including a fine exposition of James Joyce released in the UK as _Here Comes Everybody_ and in the US as _Re Joyce_) and a whole bunch of music -- in the end it's this book for which he will be universally remembered.

He may be right that it isn't his best work, and he's undoubtedly right that it's a bit preachy. But it's undoubtedly the book for which I myself will remember him. And I'll make no appy polly loggies for that, O my brothers, for it's a horrorshow book with the impact of an oozy across the glazzies, and no mistake. This malchick and his droogs deserve a place in literary history.