A Clockwork Orange

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.