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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starman" data-source="post: 5749473" data-attributes="member: 7663">I knew about that chapter and made sure to get a copy with it. I just finished it and here's the review I posted on Goodreads (with some spoilers).[sblock]I struggled with this book and nearly gave it two stars. Some spoilers follow.We'll start with the good. The philosophical questions raised by Burgess are fascinating and relevant, maybe even more so 40 years after it was published. The question of how to handle violent individuals and whether or not it is okay to deprive a person of free will in order to make society safer is a question we need to ask ourselves. Burgess does a fantastic job of raising the question and making the reader uncomfortable coming down too forcefully on either side.Now, the not so good. First, the language, the slang. Burgess says in his introduction (to my edition) that it was "meant to muffle the raw response we expect from pornography." It muffled it all right because there is so much of it that it takes you out of the story. The slang forces you to constantly stop and think about what you are reading. A good story should immerse you in the story without constantly jarring you out of it. That doesn't mean it shouldn't challenge you, but Burgess' slang serves to act more as a tripwire. Burgess also claims that "[p]eople preferred the film because they are scared, rightly, of language." That's <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. More on the film in a bit, but the fact is that I love language and within two pages of his book was just frustrated with the slang. Second, the controversial final chapter. This chapter was not in the original version published in America and is not used at all in Kubrick's film. Burgess makes a decent argument for it in his introduction. The problem is less, I think, his basis for it than its execution. He claims in his intro that real people, real characters, change. I don't think anyone will argue this. However, Alex, the main character, changes so abruptly in the final chapter that it is as jarring as his overabundance of slang. Burgess wants his characters to be real, but then has a person who is a violent sociopath wake up one day essentially saying he's getting out of the rape and violence business because he's getting older and it's boring. He's eighteen! It's an optimistic cop-out. I knew basically what happened in this chapter before I ever read the book, but I thought that Alex was older. I just don't think you can say you want realistic characters and then have a character decide overnight at the age of eighteen not to be a violent sociopath.Those two big drawbacks were nearly enough for me to drop the book down to just two stars, especially when put up against Stanley Kubrick's film. If I was grading the movie on this scale I would probably give it five stars. It does a brilliant job of playing with the themes of Burgess' novel while avoiding the thick as molasses slang, though it does have some, and it completely drops the ending. That certainly makes it a more pessimistic story, but one that I think is more satisfying. I think it's one of the rare cases of the movie being better than the book and I would probably recommend to most people that they watch it instead of reading the book. As long as they had a strong stomach that is. It is not for the faint of heart.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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