A Clockwork Orange

Author: Anthony Burgess

There were the golosses of millicents telling them to shut it and you could sloshy the zvook of like somebody being tolchocked real horrorshow. Alex and his droogs are out for a good time, which in their case means an evening of ultra-violence and rape. Which is great until the droogs turn on Alex and leave him out cold at the scene of a murder. So he ends up in prison, where they offer him a way out: the Ludovico Technique. This is supposed to turn him into a good, clean, model citizen; it's a sort of aversion therapy which makes him sick at the thought of violence. Unfortunately, it also makes him sick at the music of Beethoven, which used to be the one good thing in his life before. And when they let him out of prison he doesn't have any defences when he meets up again with his old gang, or with his former victims. Short, to the point and unrelenting; this is a book that's as hard hitting as its antihero. Told in a made-up language called Nadsat that combines bits of Russian criminal argot and rhyming slang, it takes you into a dystopian world that will leave you shocked and chilled. Yet at the end of it, as much as we hate Alex's casual attitude to violence, we end up asking ourselves whether it is morally right to deprive someone of their capacity for evil. A Clockwork Orange has won prizes and been banned in almost equal measure. The bravura use of language means it never grows stale, and it provides a direct link into the mind of an extraordinary character.

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If there is one novel that matches the awesome inventive language of A Clockwork Orange it has to be Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. Set far in the future after society has collapsed, it is told in a broken and deformed language that suits the setting: On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the laswyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. Read it aloud, and you really get the sense of it, and the authentic voice of young Riddley, the tribal priest who interprets the messages of the "Gummint" communicated through Punch and Judy puppet shows. The novel won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, is perhaps the most original post-apocalyptic tale ever written, full of riddles and mysteries and echoes of things long past that pull you in and hold you enthralled.

Also, you shouldn't miss FeersumEndjinn by Iain M. Banks, a sharp and witty tale of the end of the Earth. The dead are digitally stored in the crypt, but as the Earth approaches "the Encroachment" that could end life on Earth, four characters within the vast edifice that is the crypt attempt to activate the fearsome engine of the title that could solve the problem. Part of the story is narrated by Bascule in a broken language that resembles text messaging: "Spoke wifErgatesthi ant who seditzjuss been wurkwurkwurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u Â½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ovthi gargoyle Rosbrith."