A Clockwork Orange

If you can manage sitting through the awful narration, that is to say Nadsat and all the horrors it brings on sentence structure and half-translations of sentences, then it’s a good book. I compare it to watching a movie in which the camera work is total shit and shakey, like Cloverfield or Quantum of Solace or something really nauseating (I think of this analogy because I recently viewed The Hunger Games and nearly vomited during the entire 2 hours of shit cinematography). Once you are past all that, it is really a good book, very moving and insightful.

Children are assholes, we all know this because we were all children once. But the kids in this book are fierce, terrifying and absolutely out of control. As if I was not put off enough when he destroys a man’s books in the early going, they also assault him and leave him bleeding and crawling, only to move on in the evening and commit a very horrible rape crime that is worked out in details that are not too vivid, and so less violent and disturbing at face value, but almost more horrible because the narrator and perpetrator, Alex, skims along the act and leaves a lot out and it sort of gives you the idea he isn’t all that bothered by it. As though he needs not focus too much on the act because it just is not that big a deal to him. Really terrible.

He moves on to committing a few too many senseless crimes and is later imprisoned for them. Rightfully so. Good, we can all inhale deeply and take solace in the fact that the justice system is doing its work and bad people are punished, learn their lesson and life is good, right?

Alex begins to lose his identity in prison, beginning with losing his name and being referred to only as 655321 during his stay. Sometimes criminals get out on good behavior, but Alex chooses to get out early via the Ludovico Technique, a controversial brain-conditioning program that will reset his behaviours to fearing, terribly, any act of violence or cruelty. His chaplain, whom he is closest too, warns him of the dangers of losing his free will and all ability to choose the proper path, but he ignores it. And just before his procedure, he commits one final act of superior violence by killing the new inmate that is stirring up trouble with the four of them living in their cell.

Alex is released to find himself in a struggle. His family has moved on and so have his old droogs. Though he would like to move on as well, he is still recognized as a menace and not given the chance he was promised to fit into society. One of his old droogs and a former rival are now members of the police and use their power to intimidate, beat and ultimately, rape him. He’s rescued by the man he once met and knows only by two facts: (1) that he is the man who writing A Clockwork Orange when Alex broke into his house and (2) he is the man whose wife Alex and the gang raped. He learns that she committed suicide sometime after that and Alex finds himself as a martyr for a cause that is trying to bring down the oppressive government regime that is responsible for this society being in its current state.

The pressures of it all plus some bad side effects to Alex’s conditioning, brain washing really, force him to attempt suicide and the near-death experience resets his brain and undoes all the washing. So the violent sociopath is back and really gets his way again. In the final chapter – omitted from the early US publication and therefore omitted from the Stanley Kubrick’s film – Alex realizes that he will eventually have a baby and it will grow up to be as big a piece of shit as him, and he will be as powerless to stop it as his parents were to stop him, and so on for generations. I have heard why it was omitted, that many readers would falsely interpret a happy ending, but it really does belong in there. It gives you a sense of how difficult it is to change the culture of a violent group in any society.

So the original British version had a much better ending for me, but the entire book leaves you with a kick in the chest as to how shitty crime evolves amongst misled youth, gangs, gets treated in the prison system and in the end, reproduces. Very desperate feeling to it after it is all over and I dig that.

Lastly, for a little story on how the book was written, check these strange facts out that I found on Tor.com (a favourite website for sci-fi/fantasy nerds everywhere).

A Clockwork Orange – Brave Weird World

Double Star

Yet another Hugo Award winning Robert Anson Heinlein book off the shelf and into my tiny brain. Double Star is short, fast paced, to-the-point, and of most significance, “Early Heinlein.”  It takes place originally on Earth but soon after in outer space and on Mars and the Moon. In a brief synopsis, almost as brief as the actual plot, I’ll say that a down-and-out actor with too much pride is approached by spacemen for an acting role that pays well. By appealing to his sense of self-worth (The Great Lorenzo is a very self-confident man) they are able to smuggle him and whisk him away to Mars where he will be a fill-in for the politically outspoken leader of the Expansionist Coalition, Joseph Bonaparte. As Bonaparte has been kidnapped by anonymous enemies, the consequences for not showing up to a sacred Martian ritual are beyond consideration.

Lorenzo agrees and thus the transformation into Joseph Bonaparte begins. The enemies, who remain anonymous throughout the entire novel (typical Heinlein, really), eventually release Bonaparte, but he is in no condition to take the office he has just been voted into and Lorenzo ends up morphing into the role for more than any compensation can bring justice to.

The pace of the book makes it all very exciting. It is short, blunt, charming, imaginative and still carries Heinlein’s ideals but all put together so as not to disturb the flow of the story. Lorenzo is at first a very confused man, and remains that way until the breaking point when he realizes what must be done. But there is no confusion in the people helping him out, those that worked closely with Bonaparte and are helping him learn the role; they really pull together for the good of the cause.

These are the people that represent Heinlein’s ideals. They believe in putting an end to the exclusion of extraterrestrials in the Grand Assembly (which is similar to our House of Representatives, representing regions/groups to be acknowledged by the Solar Emperor) and that all sentient creatures are equals, and warrant the representation they deem necessary. The protagonists become political victors, then, as the afterword explains, losers and winners again. The Great Lorenzo becomes Joseph Bonaparte after his untimely death (affected so much by the torture during his kidnapping that his health deteriorates) and remains in office until his ousting, only to regain it again.

Political issues, especially those regarding Liberty, are at the core of Heinlein’s writing, but if you think you can’t handle any of his strongly libertarian themes then this just may be the perfect Heinlein book for you (in addition to the others on this blog I’ve reviewed).

Doctor Zhivago

This blog gets a little too “happy” from time to time. Unrealistic fairy tale love stories, people who work their problems out, utopian societies, good triumphing over evil, holocaust/apocalyptic worthy diseases being solved by scientists, the Land of Do-As-You-Please and those annoying, unrealistic happy endings.

Well I thought I’d go Russian, again, for a chance to get my feet settled back on familiar hard ground. Hard, unapologising, unrelenting and completely unforgiving ground. Doctor Zhivago is a tale of…love? No that’s not quite right. War? Famine? Revolution? Journeys through the dark, lonely unknown to discover that ultimately nothing in life can bring you happiness? It is all of those things, but even more.

One of the most incredible books I have ever read, and I don’t always say that even about books I like. I have never come across a character so conflicted, from so many different facets of a life full of despair and unfair disadvantages. Even second chances are cruel to the antagonist.

I have read of characters that have perhaps more severe conflicts and sources of torture: Orson Scott Card’s Ender Wiggin, Frank Herbert’s Paul Atreides, Nabokov’s Edgar H. Humbert, Dumas’s Edmund Dantes, and so on. But no one has so many converging ideals and changes of belief, changes of heart from warring sides than Doctor Yury Zhivago.

Raised without a father – who committed suicide after losing his wealth and being misled by a conniving laywer – Yury rises through a dangerous Moscow to eventually become a member of the bourgeois class after attaining a medical degree. He sympathises with the working class’s ideals, however, being very much in touch with the heart of Moscow and realizing how unfair the current system can be.

But after traveling to the front lines of World War I, his ideals begin to shift. He no longer thinks violence should be used to convey a message, and that there are no ideals strong enough to warrant the taking of innocent lives.  And when he returns, he is appalled by the violence of the October Revolution and flees with his family and father-in-law to a small town in the Urals. Did I mention the Mother-in-law didn’t make the trip because she dies a miserable death early on, tortured so much by her past with the yet-unconnected but exact same conniving lawyer who has influenced Yury’s life? Well despair overtakes her and she tries killing herself with lots of poisons, but Yury saves her life and gives her a few more dark, depressing years.

Now that the remaining happy family has survived World War I, the February and October revolutions, they make their way out of Moscow to live on their own in the Urals. Along the journey Yury meets and deals with desperate people on the run, similar to him, as well as soldiers fighting for causes some feel passionately enough to kill for and others aren’t so sure, and become deserters even at the threat of the death penalty for these actions. Once in the Urals Yury rekindles an old flame with Lara Fyodorovna, wife of a Pavel Antipov and neighbor/acquaintance of Yury’s growing up Moscow as well as a nurse he came to know and admire and, secretly, love during their time together in hospitals near the frontline in WWI. Lara had tried to pursue her run-away husband who left her because he felt he didn’t deserve her and sought to gain renown as an infantryman, fighting gallantly to defend, and in the near future help reform Russia.

The plot thickens as Yury develops an affair with Lara, and before he comes to terms with admitting to his wife Tonya what has been going on, he’s captured by the “Forest Brotherhood,” a guerilla fighting force led by a cocaine-addict that is actually a separate entity from the Red Army, but still fighting viciously against the Whites. Forced to treat people fighting for a cause he doesn’t support, Yury begins to lose taste for his profession, especially after being pinned down by White Army cadets (which is a nice way of saying teenagers with guns fighting for the cause he does support) and forced to take action and shoot at them in order to escape. He begins to contemplate leaving the Forest Brotherhood, which is risking his own life, because of the conflicts he feels being a medic for a Red-sympathising guerilla force.

But of course, these mixed emotions about the ongoing conflict just aren’t complicated enough. So the Whites throw in an extra element when they torture a man by removing one arm and one leg and force him to crawl through the forest back to the Brotherhood’s camp. There he tells them of the unimaginable horrors in store for them all as the Whites begin to close in on their region.

Strelnikov, a displaced Pavel Antipov who is now a former POW with a new name and blood lust for White Army soldiers, ends up breaking through and the Reds move on to victory after Yury escapes from the Brotherhood. He’s no safer in public now, however, and must keep a low profile, abandoning a force fighting against the Whites in time of war is reason to face the firing squads in this time, and after he learns that the Soviet government now looks unfavourably upon the Forest Brotherhood, likely for being too independent, he has no one he can trust. Even Strelnikov falls out of favour with the Soviets (as his mysterious and charismatic nature gained him loyal followers, he also gained the attention of the Communist Party as a potential threat moving forward) and is on the move, all alone, much like Yury.

The two of them meet, whilst both in hiding, and after Yury tells Strelnikov that Lara is as inaccessible to him as his estranged wife Tonya (now living in exile in Paris with their kids and her father), Strelnikov shoots himself. Of course he does. Yury winds up making an attempt to salvage his life as a poet and translator in Moscow, living the slums, taking a wife, having children and then leaving her too and eventually suffering a heart attack on the streets. Lara makes it to his funeral and is later arrested and put into a Gulag, a sort of concentration camp in Siberia Stalin was very fond of using.

The story ends with Zhivago’s friends, Dudorov and Gordon, talking about how they survived the Gulag’s to become WWII servicemen, as well as talk of a young girl named Tonya who very much resembles Yury and Lara and the physical/personality traits by which these two came to associate them.

Needless to say, Boris Pasternak was in deep shit with the Soviet Union, Stalin, the KGB and Writer’s Soviet when the book leaked out of the USSR and was printed in several other languages before the USSR ever authorized its publication in Pasternak’s homeland. He was also “encouraged” by the KGB to decline the Nobel Prize for Literature he won that year.

I think people of my parent’s generation are much more familiar with this story, as the movie was a huge hit when it came out and everyone at the time was a big Omar Sharif fan. But for my generation, I think this book goes largely unnoticed. And I can’t see why. There are probably too many lists out there of the top 100 novels, or top 100 modern novels, or any essential book collection, and Doctor Zhivago doesn’t seem to be prevalent enough on those lists. There is no reason it should ever be placed outside of the top 25 on most of these lists. But, we do live in America, and most people can’t handle this much conflict.