A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess (1962)
“A novel that forces you to learn the language of violence — then asks whether the state has any right to take it away.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
The other great British dystopia about state control of interiority — but Orwell's state succeeds where Burgess's fails, making their arguments about human nature fundamentally opposed
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Conditioning as social engineering — Huxley's citizens are conditioned from birth to love their servitude, a softer but equally total version of the Ludovico Technique
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Another novel about a brilliant young man who commits terrible violence and must find redemption — but Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov chooses repentance where Alex has repentance forced upon him
Published the same year (1962) — another novel about institutional control over the individual mind, with lobotomy replacing the Ludovico Technique as the instrument of state power
The Stranger
Albert Camus
A morally opaque narrator who commits violence without conventional motivation — Meursault and Alex both refuse to perform the remorse society demands
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
State control of the body as political instrument — Atwood extends Burgess's argument about bodily autonomy into gendered territory