Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange is one of those notorious novels that you read because you have to.

Not because it’s prescribed reading or part of a curriculum, but because it forms such a massive part of pop culture and British history that you just have to.

The novel told the story of the state’s attempt to cure a teenage delinquent.

The film adaptation of the novel by Stanley Kubrick in 1971 then elevated it to cult status.

Starring Malcolm McDowell as Alex, the violence-obsessed central character and narrator, the film was accused of inspiring violent copycat crimes and was banned by local councils in the UK.

The sequel, reports BBC, is titled A Clockwork Condition, runs 200 pages long, and develops themes from Burgess’ 1962 book.

The manuscript for A Clockwork Condition was never published and was found among papers at Burgess’s house in Bracciano, near Rome.

When the house was sold after the writer’s death in 1993, the archive was moved to Manchester, where it is being catalogued by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

Burgess himself described the work as a “major philosophical statement on the contemporary human condition”, outlining his concerns about the effect on humanity of technology, in particular media, film and television.

The manuscript also addresses the odd title of the first novel.

“In 1945, back from the army,” an extract reads, “I heard an 80-year-old Cockney in a London pub say that somebody was ‘as queer as a clockwork orange’.

“The ‘queer’ did not mean homosexual: it meant mad… For nearly twenty years I wanted to use it as the title of something… It was a traditional trope, and it asked to entitle a work which combined a concern with tradition and a bizarre technique.”

He also wrote about Kubrick and the film adaptation of his work, shedding new light on the director and the controversy surrounding the novel.

Earlier today, the Design Museum in London launched a major Stanley Kubrick exhibition, including material from the film.

Let’s hope the unpublished manuscript makes its way to publication soon.

This story goes out to Phil.

[source:bbc]