A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess
Introduction
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and is a graduate of the University there. After six years in the Army he worked as an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education, as a lecturer in Phonetics and as a grammar school master. From 1954 till 1960 he was an education officer in the Colonial Service, stationed in Malaya and Brunei.
He became a full-time writer in 1960, though his first novel had been published four years earlier. A late starter in the art of fiction, he had spent his creative energy previously on music, and he has composed many full-scale works for orchestra and other media.
Anthony Burgess maintains his old interest in music and in linguistics, and these have conditioned the style and content of the novels he writes. Though he and his wife no longer live abroad, foreign travel remains a great source of inspiration. He has, to date, published many novels, a book on linguistics, and various critical works.
His other books in Penguin are “Inside Mr Enderby,” “Tremor of Intent” and “Nothing Like the Sun,” a story of Shakespeare’s love-life.
Part One
1
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.