not quite so disturbing, but very intriguing

Rating: 9/10 (7 March 2006)

Unlike another critic, I read the book well before I saw the movie. (I was too young for that sort of movie when it came out but, fortunately--by my teen-age years--it had ascended to the status of "cult classic" and ran ubiquitously in the Greenwich Village "art theaters.") Alex leads a gang that gets drugged out at the local "milk bar" and then indulges in orgies of violence, rape, and, eventually, murder. The Beethoven fascination that others have mentioned is, frankly, a relatively minor plot component: Alex is a big-time fan of the "Glorious Ninth" and enjoys playing it while "playing doctor" with girls he's picked up at the local record store. (Odd how, in 1971, the vision of a "future society" still included LP records, a technology we did away with decades ago--even though a CD is less flexible: you can't play your favorite part of your favorite song, and you can't play it at 45 to raise its frequency by four steps.) After murdering an old lady ("and me still only fifteen," Alex quasi-guiltily monologues to us), Alex is spirited off to a jail where he is treated to the experimental "Ludovico Technique" for curing violent offenders by forcefully subjecting them--eyes maintained open with surgical clamps, ears inobstructible--to non-stop barrages of extreme torture, rape, murder, etc. But Alex isn't exactly cured, and, after his return and "reintegration" into society, the movie--quite honestly--spirals downward in pace, consistency, texture, and, frankly, excitement. The end result is that Alex is still Alex, still a rapist, still a murderer, and still "triggered" whenever he hears Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (a choral section of the Ninth Symphony).
What made the book much stronger than the movie, frankly, was its reliance upon Nadsat, the three-quarters-Russian lingo in which the teen-agers communicate. Thus, "heads" are "gullivers" (Rus. golowy), "friends" are "droogs" (Rus. drugi), "brains" are "mozgs" (Rus. mozaki), drinks are "peeted with vellocet" (spiked with speed, though "vellocet" obviously hails from the Romance family, not from the East Slavic), etc. It adds tremendously to the pace of the written story if you are quick enough to pick up on the language without having continually to check the appendix to see what is meant when Alex says, e.g., "I wasn't expecting the millicent, so I hastily slipped my nagoy nogas into my woolly pantoofles." That was missing from the movie--though it didn't have to be. I remember a cheapo, late '60s or early '70s flick called "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth": upon entering the theater, an usher handed you a card that essentially translated the troglodytes' language into English (yes, I know, cave men opposite dinosaurs: it clearly isn't a paleontology lesson), although Ringo Starr and John Matuszak's hysterical "Caveman" managed with only an occasional troglodyte word here and there, which you could always pick up from context.
TO THE EDITORS: MY "SPELLING ERRORS" (with the possible exception of inobstructible {please check the OED} and cheapo {well-known slang}) are not misspellings, but either words in Nadsat, an artificial language coined by Anthony Burgess for his novel, "A Clockwork Orange," or transliterations of Russian words into the Roman alphabet per Polish spelling rules. PLEASE DELETE THIS PARAGRAPH. THANK YOU.