Beach Thorncombe1 min agoUser ID: 3639177
22/09/2025
A father and councillor caklls for books to be banned at Budmouth School, Weymouth.
I believe the father is misguided, plain wrong even, in attempting to broach the subject of censorship purely in such an emotive and knee-jerk fashion and in the process, he ignores the Zeitgeist and cultural backdrop of 21st century life.
In my own teens, as a skinhead, I grew up with Antony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, superficially judged as a grossly offensive work depicting aggressive gang culture, violent rape and the breakdown of certain aspects of society; in some ways a dystopian mirror reflection of my own interesting though challenging teenage life but, nevertheless, I fully appreciated the underlying engine of truth guiding the narrative of that tale when, as a similar wayward soul, my own indiscretions mirrored aspects of Droog Alex’s life and came back to bite me in a similar fashion.
Fortunately, redemption was on the cards for yours truly but as we learned from George Burgess’s great work of art, Alex would face a different fate, a fate that saw The Establishment take away not just his freedom but also his freedom of choice. (The Ludovico Technique leaves Alex conditioned to feel extreme nausea and pain at the very thought of committing violence and, in the doing so, also robs him of his own free will).
So, yes, true, A Clockwork Orange can be viewed as a violent novel (or movie) but just beneath that troubling veneer lies a deep rich vein of treasure in the form of many layers of moral questions that society needs to examine, discuss and answer.
How far should The State interfere with a person’s life? Should the state enforce morals on its populace? Is a person even a person if they can’t exercise free will? Such were the questions posed by Burgess.
Just saying … A Clockwork Orange (book and film) is way way more than the sum of its individual part and, (certainly in my case), like a bitter layer of salt on the back of my own tongue, it enabled me to taste and appreciate just how sweet and precious a good life could actually be.
That juxtaposition manifest itself purely in the manner and way I was able to look beyond the superficial, controversial scaffolding of the story and, instead, see the structure, meaning and morals of what lay within.
We need such literary works. We need the raw uncomfortable truths they deliver us.
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I can’t comprehend what it must feel like to grow up as a teen in 2025. I could list several negative things that confront teens today but, hey, let us not give those things oxygen here while we’re discussing this topic because this place does not afford us the space to discuss such matters in a responsible and adult like fashion.
No. Let us leave these important though sometimes unpleasant issues to folk more equipped to address and deal with such delicate content.
Those folk are teachers. Teachers engaging with our children. Teachers who can voice, hear, unpack and explain the culture, the reasoning or the components that make up the narrative of books that, superficially, appear a bit like A Clockwork Orange appears to some folk.
Disruptive? Scary? Morally questionable?
Maybe … but such books are vital and, without them, we would lack a means of debating and understanding their controversial or provocative narratives.
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