This Week in Reading - Week Three

Woop! Last post! I think?

(Warning, this post will be very spoiler-y, as it’s the end of the book and I want to talk about EVERYTHING. Well, maybe not EVERYTHING, but MOST THINGS.)

So, where did we leave Alex last week?

Stumbling out into the world without any way to defend himself, that’s where we left him.

But what happened next? Well, Alex got some breakfast, that’s what happened. He read an article about himself in the newspaper, and then he went to visit his mum and dad, thinking they would be happy to see him…

No such luck. I mean, they weren’t necessarily horrible to him, but they definitely didn’t expect him to come back so early. Frightened, maybe. And maybe a bit disappointed in him, since they thought he had escaped from prison. And then there’s the fact that they had rented out Alex’s room to some strange man who claimed that they had been like parents to him, and that Alex was horrible for putting them through such horrible things and getting himself sent to prison like a horrible son and all that.

 So they fight a bit, which ends with Alex leaving and going to the local library to try and find out the best way to die so he doesn’t have to live like this.  And there he runs into an old friend... Well, I say friend...

Alex runs into the "starry teacher type veck". Now, you might think that would be fine, and he probably wouldn't even recognise him, but you're wrong. It seems it isn't just nadsats (teenagers, did I explain that earlier?) who’re prone to a bit of violence in this society, and this old man, apparently named Jack, saw this as a great opportunity to get his revenge. So he and his equally old friends, or colleagues or whatever-they-might-be, start beating up Alex. And Alex, of course, has no way of defending himself.

 

*insert-relevant-caption-that-is-only-here-so-I-can-link-the-source*

A guy working at the library comes to see what's happening but runs to the office to call the police instead of interfering. And Alex ends up being completely out of it when the police actually arrives. And that's why it takes him some time to recognise Dim and Billyboy, who are now millicents and apparently get on like a house on fire. But they recognise Alex, and decide that he needs to pay more. And they take it into their own hands to make sure he does exactly that.

They drive out of the city, and when they are finished, Alex is left to stumble along, lost and bloody.

That's when he stumbles upon a little cottage, and finds a man that takes him in and helps him. A man Alex soon realises he has met before... Yep, it's the same man who was writing A Clockwork Orange. Turns out his wife died after Alex and his droogs raped her, and now he lives all on his own. (And his name is F. Alexander, by the way.)

Luckily for Alex, both he and his friends were wearing masks when they committed that particular crime. Unlucky for him, the man still seems to remember Alex’s way of speaking from somewhere.

Now, F. Alexander and his buddies see Alex as a way of getting rid of the government, since what they did to Alex was so horrible. They think that if they can make people see how inhumane the things they did to Alex were, they can make people realise that they need a new government. So they have their own little plan, which they won't really explain to Alex.

They put him in a flat, and Alex goes along with it without making too much fuss.

And then things go wrong again. Or right, depending on who you are. Because F. Alexander and his friends weren’t planning on making Alex hold speeches or tell people how much the government had messed with his head. No, they wanted him to demonstrate. Which they did by playing classical music through the walls in the apartment. Why classical music? Because the doctors at the prison had made sure he reacted just as badly to the music that was played over the films they showed him, as he reacted to the things that were actually happening in the films.

All this leads to Alex freaking out, because they have locked him in the flat and he has no way of escaping the music. So he decides his best option is to jump out the window and hope for death.

*help*

He ends up in the hospital with his parents crying at his bedside. And surprisingly enough, he can actually think of punching someone without throwing up. It seems the government realised they were better off with violent criminals than with brainwashed people who can make them lose all their power by dying. Imagine that…

Now, you’d think Alex would have learned the error of his ways, wouldn’t you? Nope. Not a chance. After he gets out of the hospital, he finds some new droogs and carries on as if nothing had happened.

Kind of.

Now here’s the fun part! (This will be spoilers even for those who have watched the film! Isn’t that great!)

There’s a chapter of the book that wasn’t included in the American version. Basically, Burgess let them print it without the last chapter because he needed the money, and the man who made the film read that version of the book!

But I have one of the books where the last chapter is included!

So, what happens in this mysterious chapter?

The happy ending, that’s what.

Because Alex can’t be bothered to go with his new droogs on one of their planned crimes. Instead, he goes to a coffee shop to sulk all on his oddy-knocky. And there he meets Pete. But Pete is not a Millicent or some criminal or something like that… Nope, he’s married. To a nice lady who apparently knows nothing of what her husband was doing just a few years ago. 

They talk for a bit, and then part ways. And Alex walks away with his head full of thoughts. Maybe he should find a nice girl and settle down? Maybe he is getting to old for all the violence and murder and whatnot?

And there the book ends.

I told you he was going to suffer more. But did you listen? Did you? Honestly, did you? Because I have absolutely no way of knowing…

As for how I read? Tired and annoyed at an airport at 9pm. And a bit on a plane, trying not to feel sick and doing my best to see the words without having to awkwardly ask the stranger next to me if it would be OK if I turned on my lamp...

Part of my list, complete with very readable writing.

Seriously, though, there wasn’t more of a process than what I said last week. Except that I didn’t write down any more words, as I had come across most of them earlier in the book. I liked this book, and that means that the only reading-related process is the process where I turn the pages and pout once I finish the last one.

Seriously, I love this book. It’s at least in my top ten. Maybe higher. I’m buying my own copy.

I’m not sure I can say more about how I feel about this book without repeating myself. The language is by far my favourite part of it. Both nadsat (the slang, not the teenagers) and the way the story is written.

As I mentioned in another post, I usually put a book down if I so much as glimpse something that looks like first-person narrative (I know, I know, it’s kind of stupid… but I’m probably not going to stop). Not this time, though. I have to admit that it worried me a bit when I first saw it, but it was great. Probably partly because being referred to as “brother” by a fictional character is kind of interesting… Me being a girl and all… And I’m not even being ironic, I really liked that part. We definitely need more fictional characters who address the reader.

But what about the oranges? What about the title of the blog? What’s the answer?

Well, there have been some more mentions of clocks and oranges throughout the book, and from what I understand, people are like oranges. We’re soft and squishy and covered by a protective shell that makes everyone look approximately the same. It’s the shell that makes an orange look like an orange, but it wouldn’t be an orange without the squishy stuff on the inside. There are sour oranges and sweet oranges and oranges where the squishy bits on the inside have dried so that they’re not all that squishy anymore, but they are all still oranges. Buy if you take all the squishy stuff out and put cogs in there instead? Is still looks like an orange, but all the stuff that actually made it an orange is gone. For all you know, without the squishy stuff, it could be a painted melon.

And if you remove the squishy bits from a human (metaphorically speaking, of course), then what’s left is just the shell. Without our squishy minds we might as well just be puppets on strings. Even if someone chooses to be a dry, tasteless orange, it doesn’t make them less of an orange.

Did that even make sense? Who knows. The point is that A Clockwork Orange is exactly what Alex turns into. He still has the shell that all oranges have, but inside he’s full of cogs that make him do what the government wants him to do.

And that’s it. That’s all I have to say right now.

(And I said last week’s post was long, holy *insert-some-word-I-souldn’t-write-in-something-my-teacher-is-going-to-read-because-I-refuse-to-write-macaroni*)

- Ellen Johanne