CHAPTER & VERSE — A Clockwork Orange

Rufus McCrae: Evening, all, and welcome to Chapter and Verse. I'm Rufus McCrae, and this is my reading group down the pub, where tonight the milk is plus and the moral questions are very much on tap. Round the table we have Alice Pemberton, who brought this week's book and swears you'll be fluent in teenage Russian by page forty. Iris Marchetti, our psychologist, has spent the week asking whether you can condition the badness out of a person, and she kept looking at me while she asked it. Doc Sullivan is here because strapping a lad to a chair, clamping his eyes open and pumping him full of drugs is, God help us, technically medicine. And Arthur Nightingale read the whole thing with Beethoven's Ninth on and has had to have a little lie-down. The book is A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. And up in the balcony sit the two most thoroughly failed attempts at reform in the history of the British pub: Humphrey Thwaite and Mortimer Finch.

Humphrey Thwaite: I want it noted that I was conditioned against this programme years ago. Every week, a mild nausea.

Mortimer Finch: He gets here forty minutes early.

Humphrey Thwaite: To get a good seat for the nausea.

Mortimer Finch: Viddy well, little brother. Viddy well.

Rufus McCrae: Right, picture it. Nineteen sixty-two. A former schoolteacher from Manchester hands his publisher a book narrated by a fifteen-year-old thug, in a slang nobody on earth has ever spoken. Alice, you brought it, so you're in the dock. Sell it to me before Humphrey finds the fire exit.

Alice Pemberton: Easy. I'll just read you the first line, because the first line is the sale. 'What's it going to be then, eh? There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.' Your brain goes: what's a droog? What's a rassoodock? Then by page thirty you're thinking in it. That's the trick, Rufus. He's got you in the gang before you've noticed you joined.

Humphrey Thwaite: 'Dim being really dim.' The finest bit of characterisation in the English language, and he squandered it on a hooligan.

Mortimer Finch: You underlined it. I've seen your copy. Twice.

Humphrey Thwaite: That's a crease.

Mortimer Finch: It's a crease in biro, Humphrey.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur, you've gone a funny colour.

Arthur Nightingale: That's because it's beautiful, Rufus, and I'm ashamed of how beautiful it is. He half kills a man in the very first chapter and the sentences are dancing. That's the whole moral problem of the book in one go. You're seduced by the exact boy you ought to be crossing the road to avoid.

Rufus McCrae: Doc, you're shaking your head.

Doc Sullivan: I was seduced by nothing. Mostly I was worried about the milk. Milk-plus is milk spiked with drugs, served to teenagers in a bar. That's not science fiction. That's a Friday night in most market towns.

Mortimer Finch: Ha! He's not wrong, is he?

Rufus McCrae: So who writes a book like this? Iris, you spend your working life on why people do what they do. What made this man write it?

Iris Marchetti: There are two stories, and I'll say up front that both are stories Burgess told about himself, so hold them a little loosely. Here's the first. During the war, in the London blackout, his wife Lynne was attacked. He said it was American deserters, and that she lost the baby she was carrying. Twenty years later he writes a scene where a gang breaks into a writer's house and makes him watch while they attack his wife. And the book that writer is working on is called A Clockwork Orange.

Mortimer Finch: Oh, Christ.

Iris Marchetti: He put himself in the chair. That's not research. That's a wound.

Rufus McCrae: And the second?

Iris Marchetti: Nineteen fifty-nine. He's teaching in Brunei and collapses in front of a class. The doctors suspect a brain tumour and, as he tells it, give him a year to live. So he writes like a man racing a stopwatch, novel after novel, to leave Lynne some royalties. His biographer, Andrew Biswell, has since gently suggested he wasn't quite as dying as all that.

Doc Sullivan: Speaking as a physician: he's given a year and lasts another thirty-four. That's either a miracle or a misdiagnosis, and I know which way I'm putting my tenner.

Rufus McCrae: And the slang. Alice, where does a bloke from Manchester get teenage Russian?

Alice Pemberton: On his holidays! He and Lynne went to Leningrad in nineteen sixty-one, and he'd swotted up Russian for the trip. There were gangs of flash young lads there, same as our Teddy boys back home. And the penny drops: build the slang out of Russian and it'll never date. 'Nadsat' is the Russian ending for 'teen.' Droog is friend. Horrorshow comes from khorosho, which means good. So when Alex says 'horrorshow,' it's basically a lad from Bolton saying 'well good.'

Rufus McCrae: And the title, which I take very personal. Burgess swore he heard it in a London pub, from some old cockney saying a fella was 'as queer as a clockwork orange.'

Humphrey Thwaite: Nobody has ever said that. Ever.

Rufus McCrae: My nan used to say it about you.

Mortimer Finch: Ha! Arthur, look at his face!

Arthur Nightingale: There's a second layer hiding under it, too. Burgess had lived and taught in Malaya and spoke Malay, and 'orang' in Malay means man. A clockwork man. He buried the whole book in the title.

Humphrey Thwaite: Show-off. ... It's very good.

Rufus McCrae: So. Alex gets nicked and gets fourteen years, and then the State offers him a deal. He does a fortnight of the Ludovico Technique, which means injections, films of violence and his eyes clamped open, and he walks out cured. Free. The only man in the whole building who smells a rat is the prison chaplain. Arthur, you're the best reader at this table. Give us the chaplain's warning.

Arthur Nightingale: He's talking to Alex, who by now isn't even a name. Just a number. ... 'What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little six-six-five-five-three-two-one.'

Rufus McCrae: ... Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: ... And he's the one they all call a drunk.

Rufus McCrae: Right. The punters. Alice, you've been down the Goodreads mines with a lamp on your head.

Alice Pemberton: I have, and the one-star pile says the same two things over and over. One, they couldn't understand a word of it. Two, it glorifies violence. A fair few cheerfully admit they gave up around chapter two, which, Doc, I know you're going to defend.

Doc Sullivan: To be fair to them, chapter two is the house. That's where the worst of it is.

Alice Pemberton: And I'll take on the first complaint, because the slang isn't a wall, it's a windscreen. It keeps the blood just slightly out of focus. Write chapter two in plain English and nobody would finish it at all. The strangeness is what lets you keep reading.

Humphrey Thwaite: Fine. Clever. And the second complaint?

Iris Marchetti: That one's harder, Humphrey, because Burgess half agreed with it. The book got welded to Kubrick's film, the papers blamed copycat attacks on the film, and Kubrick pulled it from British cinemas himself. You couldn't legally see it here again until after he died.

Rufus McCrae: And the worst review of all came from the author. Alice, read us what he says in his nineteen eighty-six introduction.

Alice Pemberton: He writes: 'I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted.'

Mortimer Finch: Not permitted? By who? The milkman?

Rufus McCrae: This is a man, mind you, who once published a novel under a fake name, got asked by the Yorkshire Post to review it, and did.

Humphrey Thwaite: Did he like it?

Rufus McCrae: That's not the point, Humphrey. They sacked him.

Humphrey Thwaite: Good. The first critic in history with standards.

Rufus McCrae: Right. The big one. Doc, you've been twitching all night. Is a forced good better than a chosen evil?

Doc Sullivan: I'll be the villain, since somebody has to. Yes. I'm a doctor, and I care about outcomes. Before the treatment, an old man gets kicked in the gutter and a woman dies in her own home. After it, nobody gets hurt. The victims don't care about the theological status of Alex's soul. They care about their teeth. Go on, Iris, tell me I'm a monster.

Iris Marchetti: Except somebody does get hurt, and it's Alex. And the treatment doesn't make him good. It makes him sick. He still wants the violence. He reaches for it and then he retches. That isn't a good man. That's a bad man with a tripwire fitted. And this wasn't science fiction. British doctors used aversion therapy in the fifties and sixties, including on gay men. Nausea drugs and pictures.

Doc Sullivan: I know. That's a stain on my profession, and I'm not defending a second of it.

Iris Marchetti: Then you've already lost. That's the Ludovico Technique with a hospital badge on.

Doc Sullivan: Those men weren't hurting anyone! Alex is a—

Iris Marchetti: So it's fine as long as we pick the right people to strap down?

Doc Sullivan: It's fine when the alternative is a dead woman on her own carpet.

Iris Marchetti: The chaplain says it more plainly than either of us: 'Goodness comes from within, six-six-five-five-three-two-one. Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.'

Doc Sullivan: Very nice from a pulpit. Try saying it on a Saturday night in A and E.

Rufus McCrae: Arthur, you've been sat on your hands.

Arthur Nightingale: Because of what it does to the music. They cure him of Beethoven. Not on purpose. It's playing under one of the films, and it's a side effect. The one beautiful thing in that boy, and the State switches it off along with the violence because they couldn't tell the difference. That's the point, isn't it? You can't cut the evil out clean. It comes away with the joy still attached.

Mortimer Finch: ... That's the bit that got me.

Rufus McCrae: Burgess put the whole thing in a couple of sentences. Iris, you have the quote there.

Iris Marchetti: It's from the same introduction. 'By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or — since this is increasingly replacing both — the Almighty State.'

Doc Sullivan: ... Lovely with colour and juice. All right. He's got me on the juice.

Rufus McCrae: Now, the chapter half of you have never read. Humphrey, I believe you have feelings about chapter twenty-one.

Humphrey Thwaite: The Americans cut it, and the Americans were right, which pains me to say about anything. The book ends perfectly at chapter twenty. Alex is cured of the cure and lying there with the music back, and his last words are: 'I was cured all right.' Savage. Perfect. Close the book. Then Burgess bolts on a postscript where our little monster bumps into an old droog who's got married, and decides he'd quite fancy a wife and a baby himself. It's a greetings card.

Mortimer Finch: It's the only honest chapter in the book.

Humphrey Thwaite: Oh, here we go.

Mortimer Finch: No, listen. Every lad I knew who was a menace at fifteen was a dad with a mortgage by twenty-five. Nobody strapped them to a chair. They just got bored of being idiots. If Alex can't grow up by choice, the whole argument's a lie. Twenty-one is the chapter where he chooses.

Humphrey Thwaite: Sentimental.

Mortimer Finch: Accurate.

Humphrey Thwaite: Sentimental and accurate is the worst combination there is.

Rufus McCrae: Alice, settle it.

Alice Pemberton: It's built into the bones of the book. Twenty-one chapters, and twenty-one was the old age of coming of age. Three parts of seven. The structure of the book is growing up. Cut the last chapter and you've blown out the candles before he's had his birthday.

Rufus McCrae: And Kubrick?

Alice Pemberton: He worked from the American edition. So the film ends where Humphrey likes it, and millions of people know a Clockwork Orange whose real ending they've never heard of.

Doc Sullivan: Speaking medically, then, the film's had the Ludovico treatment. Snipped off before it could grow up.

Mortimer Finch: He's got the last page dog-eared, you know. Humphrey. The greetings card.

Humphrey Thwaite: That's a crease.

Rufus McCrae: Takeaways. One thing you're carrying home in your pocket. Doc, you lost the argument, so you're up first.

Doc Sullivan: I didn't lose. I was outvoted by poetry. Fine. Mine is this: be very suspicious of any cure that's quicker than the disease.

Rufus McCrae: Iris. One line, I know you can.

Iris Marchetti: A good act you're not allowed to refuse isn't goodness. It's obedience with better PR.

Rufus McCrae: Humphrey. Mortimer. Bring us home.

Humphrey Thwaite: ... I was fifteen once. Hard to credit. I wasn't a thug. I was worse: I was a poet. Every feeling I had, I was sure nobody had ever felt it before. Burgess knew that's what youth is. A clockwork toy. All spring, no steering. Wound up and walking into walls. ... And the reason I can't forgive chapter twenty-one ... is that it's true. You do grow out of it. And you'd give nearly anything to be that wound up again. ... That's all.

Mortimer Finch: He wants his spring back. They do a tablet for that now, Humphrey.

Humphrey Thwaite: Shut up, Mortimer.

Mortimer Finch: ... Mine's simpler. My Jean's not perfect, and God knows I'm not. Every morning for fifty-one years she's had the choice to walk out that door. And she hasn't. ... That's the only good worth having. The kind that could've gone the other way.

Rufus McCrae: Here's my verdict. A Clockwork Orange is a nasty, dazzling little book. The violence is hard going and the chaplain gets the best lines a bit conveniently, but nobody has ever made a moral argument sing like this. Here's my connection: an old cockney in a pub says someone's 'as queer as a clockwork orange,' and a bloke from Manchester takes it home and builds one of the great books of the century on it. Never underestimate what gets said down the pub. Read it if you've only seen the film. Read it if you've got a fifteen-year-old, or you were one. And read chapter twenty-one, whatever Humphrey says, because the boy grows up, and he chooses to. Read the actual book, though. Don't just listen to us bang on about it. That's Chapter and Verse. See you next week.