Hey there! Very special episode for you this week, what with the Apocalypse on the way and all, Marcus and I decided to do a public service announcement concerning all the myriad ways we might snuff it.
I ranked 10 of my favorite Apocalypses by their likelihood of happening, and Marcus and I reasoned through them. We also let slip which ones we think are the most entertaining (in theory, always in theory). In our SELL ME ON ITs this week, I bring up a fantastic new novel while Marcus reinvents the way you ingest liquids.
As ever, the Creative Commons attribution link for our theme song can be found here:
What’s that? It’s #spoilerfriday again? Well it must be time for another episode of The Spoiler Show! This week, Marcus and I are joined once again by Jeff “Old Man Time” Turner, as we engage in a spirited roundtable discussion of Ridley Scott’s PROMETHEUS. It’s a no holds barred look at the overarching themes and imagery of the film, with spoilers aplenty. Does this much-ballyhooed movie live up to all the hype? Listen and find out!
As is to be expected, this is an incredibly SPOILER heavy episode of what is called, oddly enough, THE SPOILER SHOW. Unless you don’t care about the events that occur in PROMETHEUS, make sure you’ve watched it first. Incidentally, the essay Marcus refers to can be found here: http://cavalorn.livejournal.com/584135.html#cutid1
We have a theme song now! The Creative Commons attribution link for it can be found here:
If you have any burning questions for The Spoiler Show, our email address is spoilershow@gmail.com. The feedburner link for the show is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/spoilershowpodcast. If you want to add us to your itunes queue, just click the “Add to itunes” link at the feedburner page.
This is the third part of my review of Infinite Jest. Here‘s the first part, and here‘s the second part.
The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.
Not kidding, so many SPOILERS below. Should you choose to read this book some day, don’t read this, as I’m going to be talking a lot about the last few hundred pages.
So, I finished it, in about two and a half weeks. It’s probably going to take a little longer for the enormity of the thing to set in. It was a lot easier of a read than I had expected it would be. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say that this, along with Blood Meridian, was a book I’d tried to read before, but set down, for a reason I cannot remember now. It is a challenging book that is incredibly readable, with only a few sections that were super difficult in that sense. There’s a fair amount of technical language, mostly regarding the science of optics, and there’s some math problems as well, but not as much as say, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, another gargantuan read.
I actually practiced up before reading Infinite Jest again. When I went to California for Comic-Con this year, I ended up buying three other books by Wallace, Consider the Lobster, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. You can see a lot of what was to become Infinite Jest in these books, particularly in Hideous Men, which is the one I liked the least. There’s a lot of formal experimentation in there that’s kind of exhausting to read, but when these techniques are applied sparingly in a larger (snicker) work like Infinite Jest, they worked better somehow. Things like second-person narration, examining a situation to death by looking at every single last variable, stuff like that. Sometimes I thought that Wallace had potentially been affected by what he himself termed “Marijuana Thinking”; i.e. a compulsive tendency towards explaining everything down to the last detail rather than getting on with the narrative. It’s the same thing that happens to Michael Douglas’ pothead professor in the excellent Wonder Boys, one of my favorite movies.
I really thought the baby imagery was interesting, particularly when Hal ends up going to an “Inner Infant” support group meeting, that was hilarious, especially when you know that Hal probably could use some therapy, just not that. It all ties in to Wallace’s mother/murderer theory, which is expounded to us supposedly through the medium of the Infinite Jest movie. I was sad that we never ended up going to the Concavity physically, but it probably works better as a metaphor for a decaying civilization, toxic relations between the U.S. and Canada, the death of history, any number of things. As a Canadian, I really appreciated that O.N.A.N., for all the stupidity and corruption that went into its creation, decided to be sensible and use the Metric system. Imperial measurements are stupid.
If the objective of Infinite Jest is, like James O. Incandenza’s eponymous film, to make an entertainment so fascinating that you just can’t help wanting to read it again, I think Wallace did an excellent job. While I was researching for this “review” last night, I ended up finding many different peoples’ interpretations of the ending, and what exactly is wrong with Hal Incandenza at the beginning of the book (Infinite Jest is set up fractally, so that the beginning comes after the end. The Invisibles, my favorite comic book of all time, did the same thing).
Then I started thinking about the Hamlet thing. As I mentioned before, Infinite Jest‘s Enfield Tennis Academy segments have an overarching story that resembles that of Shakespeare’s greatest play. Some of the comparisons are very obvious: Hal and his dead father stand in for Hamlet and his father; Charles “C.T.” Tavis and Avril Incandenza could be Claudius and Gertrude. But once you get past those main characters, it starts to get a bit murkier. The ghost/wraith of James Incandenza mentions the name LAERTES to Don Gately, a staffer at Ennet House, a rehab centre not far from the tennis academy, once he (Gately) has been hospitalized after an encounter with gun-wielding Quebecois. Gately as LAERTES doesn’t really make sense to me though, if anything, John Wayne, the silent Canadian tennis phenom and rival of Hal’s is Laertes. If Gately’s to be present when Hal unearths his father’s body (which he dreams about, and Hal mentions earlier/later on), he’s got to be Horatio, right? He certainly gets a lot of things explained to him, like Horatio.
I don’t think that James Incandenza’s really the old king anyway. Hamlet and Horatio go to the graveyard to view Ophelia’s funeral, and end up disinterring Yorick, the man of “infinite jest”. Which makes a lot more sense to me. It is revealed through academic criticism and Hal’s own thoughts that all James wanted to do was entertain people. Early on in his career, he’d focused mostly on the optics in his films, treating them as an excuse to make cooler lenses for his cameras. The eponymous Infinite Jest film has as its aim to make his son, who he believed to be mute at this point due to his not speaking very often (his (Incandenza’s) being an alcoholic probably exacerbating this as well), come out of his shell by being so entertaining he had no choice but to react. In doing so, he creates a monster, but that’s besides the point.
You could almost talk about this book forever (see above), but I have to call it quits. If you think you’re up to the challenge, give it a shot. It’s not as terrifying as it looks from the outside, yet it is more soul-searing than you could possibly believe.
Who would I recommend this book to? People who are into really, really in depth worlds created by writers. People with an interest in potential future Canadian-American relations. People who have a lot of patience.
Total pages read since January 1st: 10684 pp.
Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 26
Next up on the Resolution Project: Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1935)
This is the second part of my review of Infinite Jest. Here‘s the first part, and here‘s the third part.
“The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’
Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.’” (p. 600)
The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.
This is my second quasi-review of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The first cane be found here, and an entertaining and completely unexpected detour incurred while reading can be found here. If you want a brief synopsis of the book and what it’s about, check out my first article, although as you may have heard, Infinite Jest is not something to be taken lightly (literally: my shoulder is sort of sore now from carting it around in my bag for the last two weeks). I can only imagine what the book would have been like to interact with in hardcover…
- One of the truly tragic things about David Foster Wallace’s suicide, which is really impossible to keep out of your mind when reading the book sometimes, I’m sorry, is how well I think he’d have fit in with the technology we have at our disposal today. Infinite Jest is pretty much a hypertext book already, what with the extensive use of footnotes, so I can’t help but imagine what he could have done with something like a wiki. One of the only things I’ve ever read that approaches this use of the actual physical form of the text (i.e. that the footnotes/endnotes are actually an integral part of the page/book as a whole) would be Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books, which even do Wallace one further by having characters escape the main text and take refuge in a footnote. I can see why people are disenchanted by the continual turning to the back page, though. If Infinite Jest is ever converted into a digital form, not just put on e-readers but actually converted, you could avoid this problem somewhat by having mouseover tooltips replace some of the endnotes, but that takes away some of the comic timing the book possesses, which is equivalent to waiting a beat after an action occurs, and then telling you the punchline.
- Part of what makes the book so engrossing, yet difficult to read is the amazing amount of world-building Wallace did when constructing the O.N.A.N. As I mentioned last time, the really great books are all to be read in their own way, and Infinite Jest is no exception. As like A Clockwork Orange where I didn’t really have any trouble following the use of nadsat speech, here I can still follow most of the idioms and different names for drugs and things like that. Unlike Clockwork, which used words from other languages mostly to form a pidgin speech, the way people speak in Infinite Jest is rich with symbolism and metaphor, and somewhat addictive. I’ve been thinking of the word “map” with regards to one’s face/life a lot more recently, and while it’d be nice, I’m pretty sure that Bob Hope, Bing Crosby et al. probably aren’t slang words for drugs in my area. One can still dream though.
- Check this out!
This is a movie poster done up for one of James O. Incandenza’s art films. The guy’s website is http://pooryorickentertainment.tumblr.com/, and he’s done a whole bunch of other ones. They’re one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, equally as cool as the Decemberists music video I posted about last time. Go check out the site, there’s some excellent stuff on there. What is it about this book that brings so much out of people? I feel like it is, like I noted above, a combination of the amazing work Wallace put into the world of the book, along with the amount of time and effort you need to put in to read it. I’ve only ever had this sort of relationship with a text a few times, most notably when I read Gravity’s Rainbow a few years ago. Infinite Jest is a lot easier of a read than Rainbow, though, with the possible exception of Wallace’s intense use of ten-dollar words. This must be akin to the feeling religious people get when they read the Bible? I’m normally a very quick reader, so spending more than a week or two on a book is a little different for me, combined with the fact that it is actually a bit difficult to take this book anywhere due to its size.
- One thing I’m really hoping for/dreading at this point in my reading (I’m on page 682 as of today) is whether or not we end up going to see the Concavity/Convexity. Maybe it’s the horror fan/sci-fi nerd in me (go look at the name of this blog again), but I really want to see giant babies wreaking havoc over a blasted hell-scape. I want to see the bugs that have grown to human size and have since become responsible house owners in formerly human communities like Troy, NY. During the sequence in which Poor Tony is forced into heroin withdrawal and lives in a dumpster, you know I really felt for the guy and all, but deep down I wanted to see him launched through the air on a garbage catapult into the Concavity, just so we could see what that place was actually like. Sort of like an event that happens in Gravity’s Rainbow, not to give any spoilers away. It might still happen, but I’m increasingly worried that Wallace is going to pull a Stephenson and end the book inconclusively.
“TINE: Absolutely not, Mart. No way a downer-association-rife term like refugee is going to be applicable here. I cannot overstress this too assertively. Eminent nondomain: yes. Renewal-grade brand of sacrifice: you bet. Heroes, new era’s breed of new pioneers, striking in bravely for already-settled good old settled but unfoul American territory: bien sûr.” (p. 404)
Sometimes coincidence is amazing. I just finished the Eschaton sequence in Infinite Jest last night, and was thinking of writing a blog post about how much I enjoyed it (the sequence). It looks like it’d be a fun game to play, probably a lot easier now too with our advancements in computer technology over the years. Maybe Apple could put out an iphone app for the game, with calculators to help you figure out civilian casualties and fallout spread.
I was even thinking about describing the game, for people that have never read Infinite Jest, but now I don’t have to! In an amazing coincidence, my favorite band, The Decemberists, has teamed up with Michael Schur of Parks and Recreation fame, to direct a music video for their song “Calamity Song”. Lead singer Colin Meloy was one of the people involved in the Infinite Summer project a few years ago, and he plays Michael Pemulis (you can tell by the hat and the yelling).
“Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.” (p. 54)
The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.
This is going to go a little differently than my normal book reviews. Since Infinite Jest is so big (not to mention so amazingly good), I’m going to split my posts about the book up into 4, maybe 5 rather than one big one. Also, since I’m only about a third done (again, there is a lot of stuff going on in this book that I’ll probably only really have a handle on by the end), this post’ll be more like stray observations concerning the text rather than any sort of grand review.
Infinite Jest is a chronicle of the near future, where individual years have been subsidized by the O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations, i.e. the United States and Canada, most likely Mexico) to raise money. So instead of say, 2011, you get something like “The Year of the Whopper”, or “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”, which most of the book takes place during, called Y.D.A.U. for short. Surprisingly, this doesn’t get old, and it’s pretty funny actually to see how, say, academic writing deals with the shift in years. There’s a fair amount of academic papers strewn throughout the book. The story mostly takes place around the Boston area, with some excursions (so far) to Tucson, Arizona. It looks at the lives of young men and women training at E.T.A., the Enfield Tennis Academy, an elite tennis/hard science prep school, and it also looks at recovering Substance-abusers at the Ennet House and Alcohol Recovery House (sic.), which is just down the hill. Some important people are: Hal Incandenza, a tennis prodigy and habitual marijuana smoker; Remy Marathe, a potentially treasonous member of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a hard-core Quebecois separatist group whose gimmick is that they all use wheelchairs to get around; Don Gately, a worker at the Ennet House with a history of breaking and entering. There’s a ton of people in the book, that’s only a few of them.
- One of the main themes that links the groups of people whose lives are attached to either building is the condition of being overly interested in oneself and not so much the world around you (there’s a pretty good reason why North America is now called O.N.A.N.). The lives of the young tennis prodigies revolve around tournaments and grueling training regimes, while the drug abusers down the hill are primarily concerned with taking stock of their personal inventory and trying to beat the disease that has gotten its clutches into them. One of the best examples of the solipsism that has taken over the future, not to mention one of funniest parts of the book so far, is an examination of the societal impact of videophones on O.N.A.N.ian culture. Wallace takes us through the history of videophony, the machine being hooked up to your TV and computer as part of one entity called a “TP”, or teleputer. He shows us how human vanity gets out of hand when it comes to the videophone, starting with masks users can wear instead of maintaining their faces at all times, then whole body cutouts you can stand behind, the whole thing culminating in little dioramas that fit over the TP camera, giving the illusion of a lovely house with beautiful people in it. Finally most discerning users just turn the video part off, but some less discerning types still use the dioramas (and are looked down on for it).
- There must have been a zeitgeist thing going on in the early nineties where authors were starting to become concerned with the idea of “entertainment-as-weapon.” Fellow Time 100 List book Snow Crash (1992) takes its name from a computer virus/designer drug that makes people into zombies and has the potential to be an Omega-level species ending event, while Theodore Roszak’s excellent Flicker (1991) deals with the dissemination into the mainstream of the works of an obscure German filmmaker whose overpowering nihilism makes people check out of life. “The Entertainment” that James Incandenza produced as his last filmed work must have come out of this idea, D.F.W. is such a smart guy that I’m sure he’d read or at least heard of these two books as he worked on Infinite Jest. The twist Wallace throws in the mix is that the Assassins des Faulteuils Roulents are basically using it as a way to distinguish themselves from their hated O.N.A.N. enemy, as these proud Quebecois apparently have so much more to live for than your average American, who’ll choose to spend their whole lives in pursuit of frivolity and mindless entertainment. Quoth Marathe speaking to his handler from the O.N.A.N. Office of Unspecified Services, M. Hugh Steeply:
“For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from restrain and forced duress.” (p.320)
In other words, O.N.A.N.ites deserve to get turned into zombies by the “Entertainment”, as it is the ultimate expression of how they choose to waste their precious freedom by sitting around doing nothing. It’s a shame, though, that Wallace didn’t live long enough to see what I believe is the real entertainment that could doom us all, cat videos on Youtube. Celebrate the end of the world with me, won’t you?
- I’m glad to see that James Incandenza’s dad shares my opinion of golf: “Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.” (p. 163). I’m surprised to see how much I’m enjoying learning about tennis, though.
- I’m also learning a lot about doing drugs. So far my favorite drug-related conversation comes when Pemulis, a student at E.T.A. comes across an incredibly dangerous hallucinogenic named DMZ. The description made me laugh out loud at work: ”One monograph had this toss-off about DMZ where the guy invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid.” (p. 214). A love of pharmaceuticals is another thing that the E.T.A. sequences share with the rest of the book. For all of the difficulty I had getting through the unblinkingly difficult to parse Ebonics in the second Poor Tony and C sequence, which starts on page 128, (I had to read it out loud to Lady E., because my brain was getting tired every few lines, note not sentences, lines, it’s basically one long run-off sentence, so thanks to her for helping me through that rough patch) it really laid the groundwork for what daily life would be like as a junkie. They say that great books, the truly great ones, teach you how to read them as you go. This is especially true, I believe, for Infinite Jest. Where something like this sequence could have just been an anecdote to provide “local colour” in a more disconnected work like The Berlin Stories or The Golden Notebook, there is a huge payoff from the sad story of the cross-dressing junkies. Through them, you learn about the Boston Common drug ecology, who’s selling what and where, and you also get a necessary counterpoint to the relatively benign drug habits someone like Hal Incandenza (one-hitters) or Michael Pemulis (‘drines) has. It shows you what’s at stake.
- The saga of Joelle van Dyne, the Prettiest Girl of All Time, is probably the most emotionally affecting thing I’ve read so far, with the potential mention of every time Mario Incandenza shows up. It, along with the basic fact that, yes, this is sort of like Hamlet at a tennis academy, what with the stepfather moving in with Hal and Mario’s mom before their father’s body’s really even cooled, is the most tragic story in the book. I think the first time I tried to read Infinite Jest I must have given up somewhere around her suicide attempt, as it is one of the most difficult and heart-wrenching pieces I’ve ever read. That, coupled with the fact that she’s sort of a non-entity at this point and it is only later that we find out where she fits in with the Incandenza family saga made it very hard to read it was so sad. If I had to compare it to something for a non-reader to understand, I’d say it’s sort of like if Gaspar Noe’s film Enter the Void was condensed down into about thirty pages of sheer desperation. People who’ve seen the movie can chuckle now, as they know it could probably have used some judicious editing, but the situation is very similar in both works; a junkie remembers their entire life in the moments leading up to their imminent demise. Here’s the opening credits for that movie, as they’re sort of amazing. Listen to them really loudly, in a darkened room if at all possible:
I’ll have more on Infinite Jest next week. Here’s a quote.
“Certain far-right fringes in Alberta weren’t too pleased, but not much pleases an Albertan far-rightist anyway.” (p. 311).
I wish this wasn’t so true, and that there weren’t so many of them around in real life.
For the second part of my review of Infinite Jest, go here. For the third part, go here.
The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned.
“As I slooshied, my glazzies tight shut to shut in the bliss that was better than any synthemesc Bog or God, I knew such lovely pictures. There were vecks and ptitsas, both young and starry, lying on the ground screaming for mercy, and I was smecking all over my rot and grinding my boot in their litsos. And there were devotchkas ripped and creeching against walls and I was plunging like a shlaga into them, and indeed when the music, which was one movement only, rose to the top of its big highest tower, then, lying there on my bed with glazzies tight shut and rookers behind my gulliver, I broke and spattered and cried aaaaaaah with the bliss of it. And so the lovely music glided to its glowing close.” (p.25)
Here’s a book that many people I know were surprised I hadn’t read before for whatever reason. Of the books I’ve read so far on the Resolution Project, this one’s probably the best known, although less so for Anthony Burgess’ actual text and mostly for the fantastic film adaptation helmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. 15-year old Alex lives in a dystopian future, where gangs populated by “droogs” rule the streets like barbarians, raping and pillaging their way through a terrified populace every night. After a night out that ends in a horrific murder and Alex’s subsequent betrayal by his cohorts, he is sentenced to a long prison sentence, of which he serves only two years before getting out upon being subjected to the horrific “Ludovico” rehabilitory technique. The toughest part about this experimental drug/video stimulation treatment is not the things he’s forced to see, no it’s the fact that the scientists use his beloved classical music during these scenes, taking away from Alex the only thing that made him close to being a human being.
I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would. I first saw the movie years ago, and I admired it for its audacity (not to mention for its being my first taste of the Kubrick oeuvre) and message. I watched it again this week to get back into the frame of reference, and while it’s not what you would call a fun film, there’s a few bits of levity in Malcolm McDowell’s full-body performance and excellent oratory skills. The book, however, I found to be a lot more entertaining, much more so than other great dystopian works like George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. What endeared me to it was a combination of the language used throughout, as well as the style of narration provided by Alex (both of which are things I liked about the movie too, to a lesser extent).
Burgess, the introduction by Blake Morrison tells me, drew upon the conflicts he saw between the English “Teddy boy” and “Mod” teen subcultures of the day for some inspiration, but a lot of it also sprang from his fertile imagination. The lovely “nadsat” patois that Alex and his droogs speak throughout I found to be a fun puzzle, as my copy did not have a glossary (in addition to trimming the last chapter, the first American version had one). And to be quite honest, you don’t need it at all. Passages like the one quoted above are a little tough to get through at first, but once you start figuring out the lingo, you can just sit back and be entertained by the intricate wordplay. Nadsat (there’s a dictionary here, if you want to be a spoilsport, or if you just want to check it out) is a combination of cockney rhyming slang, Russian and even some Elizabethan English at times. It’s strange, but the constant usage of this made up language throughout made me like the book more than some other attempts to replicate the way people spoke in a certain era (I’m looking at you, here, Beloved), due to the fact that I’ve never heard anyone talk like that before, and it doesn’t read as a clumsy way to replicate a dialect I could do more efficiently in my head.
I’m also quite fond of Alex’s narration. He’s a charming asocial monster, who continually refers to himself as “your humble Narrator”, and to the readership at large as “my brothers.” While he does indeed do some incredibly reprehensible shit, you’ve kind of got to enjoy his joie de vivre, and even begin to empathize with him after the State is through fucking with his “gulliver.” Again, the use of nadsat as opposed to our language helps to this end, Burgess himself (in the intro) saying that it serves as a barrier between us as readers and the violence perpetrated by Alex. Had everything been described to us in modern English, I feel the book would have been closer to a Cormac McCarthy nihilism-festival of horrors (one of the big difficulties I have been having with Blood Meridian), but in nadsat, the reader is able to catch himself enjoying the spectacle at times. You then have to reflect on why violence is entertaining, letting you briefly glimpse the droog that lives inside us all.
In this Canadian election year, the way Burgess-by-way-of-Alex looks at politics is especially important and eerily prescient. Alex’s treatment at the hands of Dr. Brodsky becomes a bit of a cause celebre after his release, which makes you think about how our current Conservative government likes to view itself as “tough on crime” as seen in this passage:
“This gazetta I had seemed to be a Government gazetta, for the only news that was on the front page was about the need for every veck to make sure he put the Government back in again on the next General Election, which seemed to be about two or three weeks off. There were very boastful slovos about what the Government had done, brothers, in the last year or so, what with increased exports and a real horrorshow foreign policy and improves social services and all that cal. But what the Government was really boastful about was the way in which they reckoned the streets had been made safer for all peace-loving night-walking lewdies in the last six months, what with better pay for the police and the police getting like tougher with young hooligans and perverts and burglars and all that cal. Which interessovated Your Humble Narrator some deal.” (p.98)
To me, this sounds much like, say, my hometown rag the Edmonton Sun espousing wise on how the Conservative government has done such a good job governing me in the past few years, and how if I’d like to stave off the complete and utter annihilation of everything I hold dear I’d better fucking vote for them or else the Commie-Pinko-Terrorist Internationalista will win. But I digress. What Burgess implies throughout A Clockwork Orange is that the Government doesn’t really mind the likes of Alex and his ilk running around causing havoc, as it provides easy talking points with which to appeal to the “law and order” vote. This is a lot like Orwell’s revolving door adversaries of Eurasia and Eastasia in 1984, which also keep the populace in a general state of heightened awareness of everything but their overlords. In fact, the most disturbing part of Burgess’ novel is that some of the films Alex is subjected to during the Ludovico Technique sequence are real depictions of violence and rape, with the implication that the Government either set up those events or just let them happen without interference.
Overall, even though it has been unfairly shadowed by the equally excellent film adaptation, which cut off the book’s true ending (where Alex realizes his barbaric ways are in fact a part of growing up, albeit a little extreme), A Clockwork Orange is a fantastically potent book, even more relevant today than when it was originally published.
