Anthony Burgess

A Summary and Analysis of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange

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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

One of the most original and endlessly thought-provoking dystopian novels of the whole twentieth century, A Clockwork Orange (1962) is Anthony Burgess’ best-known novel. But what is the message behind this curious novel?

Stanley Kubrick’s famous 1971 film adaptation of the novel departed from the novel in some respects, so it’s worth offering a brief summary of the plot of A Clockwork Orange before we ponder the meaning of this novel and offer some words of analysis. (We have compiled some curious Anthony Burgess facts here.)

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Five Fascinating Facts about Anthony Burgess

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Quick facts from the life of Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange

1. His most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, may have been partly inspired by a dark event in Burgess’ past, shortly after he and his first wife married. For this classic novel, Burgess invented an entire new language, Nadsat (the name is taken from the Russian for ‘teen’ – i.e. a form of slang used by teenagers). Burgess, a gifted linguist, would later translate T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land into Persian (unfortunately, the translation has not been published). The book was made into an even more controversial film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. Burgess had mixed feelings about the film, referring to it as ‘Clockwork Marmalade’, and he received just £5,000 in subsidiary rights for the film. Quite where the title A Clockwork Orange came from remains a mystery, but Gary Dexter has speculated that Burgess may have misheard ‘Terry’s Chocolate Orange’ in a noisy pub and liked the mondegreen so much he used it as the book’s title. The title has inspired the nickname ‘The Clockwork Orange’ for Glasgow’s metro system.

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