Friday Focus: Focus on Character

Characters! An essential part of most books!

As I mentioned in my last post, the main character in A Clockwork Orange is Alex. He lives with his parents, or his “pee and em,” as he also calls them (that's his dad and mum, I think, but it might also be the other way around..). And, as I also mentioned, he’s a bit not nice. Or, more accurately, a nasty piece of work. Alex is fifteen years old (woo, look at me, repeating myself again), quite partial to classical music, and likes violence. A lot. Maybe a bit too much…

Alex has these three droogs (friends-ish) called Dim, Pete, and Georgie, and they all go about bothering people. Or assaulting people, if you want to be specific. The other three are older than Alex, but seem to follow his lead anyways (at least so far...). There isn’t that much information about them, except that, to Alex, Dim is quite dim. Also, none of his droogs seem to be quite as happy with being Alex’s inferiors as Alex thought… (I actually know some more stuff, as I finished the book on the plane last night, but I’m not telling, as I’m saving that part for next week.)

(I’ll give you a little taste, though, since I’ll be putting it in this Sunday’s post.)

Since I’ve read a bit more than last time, I’ve also encountered some more characters, mainly related to a "little" (oh, what a liar I am) run-in he had with the police, which I will give you all the details of in my next post (again with the lies… I’m disappointed in me). There’s the policemen, or millicents, as Alex calls them, who are really mean and not like police should be at all. And the people at the prison (specifically the wardens) are all quite unfriendly (understatement). There is also this one prisoner that comes along and messes up everything for Alex.

Then there’s also the people they’ve assaulted. There’s the couple in the cabin, the “starry teacher type veck”, the shop owner and his wife, Billyboy and his droogs (the other gang from my last post), and the lady with the cats (you’ll hear more about her on Sunday. Promise).

As to what I think of the characters… I like Alex. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not approve of 99% of what he does, but I’ve grown attached to him. Sort of. I especially like the way he speaks, and the way he narrates the story. I like the way he refers to himself as “Your Humble Narrator” (humble… heh…), and the way he refers to people as “my brothers”, even the reader. It’s just the way the word makes you feel like he knows people without knowing them, and it makes him appear really sure of himself and a bit cheeky, and I love it. Makes me feel all happy for him, which is a bit weird…

Anyway; Dim. I don’t like him. He just seems annoying. I know Alex finds him a bit annoying, so that might be why, but I still don’t like him. Georgie and Pete seem more decent (at least as decent as one can be while being a criminal teenager), so I don’t really feel any specific way about them… I mean, they're horrible, but as characters they're all right.

This is nothing like what they look like in my head, and I haven't seen the weird eyelash thing mentioned in the whole book, but it's an interesting look...

And that’s it for today, kids! (Please tell me there are no actual children reading this. Children should be kept as far away from this book (and anything related to it) as possible.)

-Ellen Johanne

This Week in Reading - Week One

A Clockwork Orange. Horrible, but I like it. At least so far. 

Fifteen-year-old Alex tells the story, and he’s… not a nice person. The book starts with him describing who he and his friends are, and where they are, which is a place called the Korova Milkbar, where they serve milk with “something else.” And that something else is a drug. Or drugs. 

It’s all a bit confusing, really. You see, Anthony Burgess made this book a bit of a puzzle, by making up a teenage slang that Alex uses. It’s making it more interesting, I’ll give him that. But it also led to me making (or attempting to make) my own glossary (my success in this is up for discussion).

Anyway, Alex and his friends, or his “droogs” (I have an inkling of what it means, and it’s probably friends or something, but I can’t help but think it sounds like lackeys… but it’s most likely not that) soon leave the bar. They come across an old man, who’s carrying some books. They ruin his books, beat him up, destroy his clothes and his umbrella, and let him stagger off.

Then they go to another bar, and proceed to spend all their money on some old ladies so they have both an alibi and a reason to steal from a shop nearby. Which they do, sending the shop owner and his wife to hospital while they’re at it. 

During the same night, they have a run-in with another gang, steal a car, drive to a cabin, beat up the man living there, and rape his wife. They push the car into the river and go back to the Korova, where Alex ends up hitting one of his friends because he was being “a bastard with no manners and not the dook of an idea how to comport yourself publickwise, O my brother.” Which I find mildly funny, considering how they’ve spent the night. Then they bicker for a bit, before parting to go home. And that’s about as far as I’ve gotten. 

Now, have oranges or clocks been mentioned? Yes. The man in the cabin was writing a book named "A Clockwork Orange". Now, the back of my book says that the State tries to reform Alex, and the little snippet from the book the man was writing says:

“- The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last rounds the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen – “ (p.18)

I don’t know about you, but it’s making me just a little suspicious… 

As for what I’m expecting next: some more crime, a lot of words I don’t understand yet, and Alex getting arrested.

(Should I sign these? People usually do that, don't they? I didn't do it last time, but maybe I should...)

- Ellen Johanne

(There we go!)



(Edit: I added a page number to the quote because I am an idiot and didn't remember to do it when I wrote the post...)
 

Friday Focus: Focus on Author

Over the next four weeks, I’m going to be reading a novel for an English project, and you will get to read about it in several blog posts! Isn’t that great?

This blog gave me an excuse to read a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while, so, here it is, a blog about me reading A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (yes, the capital letters are necessary).

It was written by Antony Burgess in 1962, and the rest of this post will be all about him!

Anthony Burgess – A Mini-Biography

Anthony Burgess, 1968.

According to Britannica, Antony Burgess, originally named John Anthony Burgess Wilson, was born on February 25^th, 1917. He was born in Harpurhey, in Manchester, to Elizabeth Burgess and Joseph Wilson. His mother and his only sister both died of influenza when he was two years old, and his father married a publican in 1922. In 1928, when Burgess enrolled in secondary school, they lived in Moss Side. It was here that he wrote his first published short stories and poems.

The webpage of the International Antony Burgess Foundation tells that he graduated from Manchester College in 1940, with a degree in English Literature. Over the course of the next six years, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Army Educational Corps. 

In 1942, he married his first wife, Llewela (Lynne) Jones. After the second world war, he taught at several colleges, in Wolverhampton and Bamber Bridge, as well as teaching at Banbury Grammar School after he moved to Oxford. 

He completed his first full-length stage play in 1951, and wrote his two first novels around the same time, A Vision of Battlements and The Worm and the Ring. He and his wife moved to Malaya in 1954, before moving to Brunei. 

One day in 1959, Burgess suddenly collapsed. He was misdiagnosed with a fatal brain tumour. Over the next few years he published several novels, A Clockwork Orange being one of them. 1961 saw the start of his frequent contributions to television and radio programmes. 

In 1968, his first wife died of liver failure, and Burgess married his second wife that same year. They, along with her son, moved to Malta, and acquired various houses throughout Europe, before settling in Monaco in the middle of the 1970s.

Anthony Burgess wrote 33 novels throughout his life, along with 25 non-fiction works, and more than 200 musical works. He died in 1993, 76 years old.