A Clockwork Orange was one of the drivers behind the early punk movement. If you remember, the early punkers wore neat - if extremely unusually - dressed with highly polished boots and clean clothes. Didn't stop their amorality, forced or otherwise, but they were more-or-less conscious copies of Alex and his droogs. It was only later that the Sid Vicious/filth/Vivian the Young Ones punk style took over. Like most "movements", the origins were quickly forgotten in the day-to-day reality of punkdom.
I read an article in the early 1970s in something (could have been an English newspaper) which interviewed some (not well-known) punkers, who claimed that Anthony Burgess was their godfather and that A Clockwork Orange was their Bible. I remember being doubtful, from their barely coherent responses to the interviewer's questions, that any of them had actually read it all the way through ... page 1. Sounds like the usual relationship most Christians have with the Bible, doesn't it?
I've had a quick trawl through the A Clockwork Orange sites, and while all of them laud Burgess' good/evil process plot, none of them look more than cursorily under the bonnet. Some of the underlying implications of the book (Russian-style socialism and a Politburo-style government, apparatchik-style bureaucracy and, of course, the heavily Russian-influenced Nadsat counter-culture jargon) are pretty much ignored in most analyses. Burgess wrote the book in 1962 when he believed he was on borrowed time - he'd been diagnosed with a brain tumour which, in the end, completely failed to kill him - and A Clockwork Orange was one of several books he wrote that year. He believed, I think, that the Russians would eventually triumph over the West. I think that in reality, and although it was never stated by Burgess, A Clockwork Orange was set (lightly, I will admit) in a post-conquest communist England.
That satisfactorily explains Nadsat and the other Russian influences as no other explanation is likely to be able to do. Of course, the Minister for the Interior looked and sounded a lot like - well, Tony Blair does today.
Oh well, FWIW.
