Volume 5 – "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess

Often seen through the prism of the film, Anthony Burgess's dystopia is more than a graphic tale of youth ultra-violence. As the pendulum swings between youth violence and police state, individual free will is easily forgotten.

Written fourteen years after Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange presents a democratic dystopia. In place of totalitarianism is a world where the state is weak and youth rampage out of control. Consumerism, leisure and pop culture; citizens are terrorised by teenagers rather than the secret police, yet Burgess's vision is far from a failed state.

Weak though Burgess's state may be, it still possesses extensive powers, including the frightening Ludovico Technique: a Room 101-like Pavlovian conditioning programme, which compels criminals into compliance by inducing a paralysing nausea whenever they feel the urge to commit crime. With both political parties willing to sacrifice individual free will for their political goals, there appears to be little hope.

Written in response to the work of behaviourist psychologist B.F. Skinner, Burgess uses language, conditioning and subliminal messages to convey the subtle manipulations by which rulers subvert free choice. Accept human nature in all its imperfections; trying to perfect it into something it isn't only creates monsters.

Volume 5 looks behind the violence of A Clockwork Orange to reveal a story of good, evil and human nature; an illustration of the tightrope democracy is forced to walk. Sacrifice human free will for political expediency and the road to totalitarianism is open.

A Century of Dystopia – the series