Piece in the comic today about Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange by the novelist Irvine Welsh. It hadn't occurred to me that Welsh is so young that his first acquaintance with the tale was with the Stanley Kubrick movie. However I read the novel when it came out - and when I was young and enthusiastic - and thought it a very remarkable piece of writing, fierce but eventually moral.
Burgess, a brilliant writer, had a huge and varied output and deservedly became enormously rich. However he comes across like so many brilliant writers and poets as bigoted, paranoid, reactionary and self-regarding. He believed in the cold war which is represented in a future configuration in the novel.
But the whole social atmosphere of the novel is a sort of extrapolated fifties, very right-wing somehow. The movie is different.
I have a much-treasured image of my granddaughter Mirabel and her Cousin Lola posing in the very same pedestrian underpass that Alex and his droogs hang out in in the movie. London locations, don'tcha just love'em?
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Literary Milestone new
Literary Milestone new