Alex (A Clockwork Orange) in the novel "A Clockwork Orange". The character is portrayed as a sociopath who robs, rapes, and assaults innocent people for his own amusement. Intellectually, he knows that such behaviour is morally wrong, saying that "you can't have a society with everybody behaving in my manner of the night". He nevertheless professes to be puzzled by the motivations of those who wish to reform him and others like him, saying that he would never interfere with their desire to be good; he simply "goes to the other shop". He speaks Nadsat, a teenage slang created by author Anthony Burgess. The
A Clockwork Orange (novel) However, each of these instances came after the release of Stanley Kubrick's popular 1971 film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange", itself the subject of much controversy. "The Sunday Telegraph" review was positive, and described the book as "entertaining ... even profound". "The Sunday Times" review was negative, and described the book as "a very ordinary, brutal and psychologically shallow story". "The Times" also reviewed the book negatively, describing it as "a somewhat clumsy experiment with science fiction [with] clumsy cliches about juvenile delinquency". The violence was criticised as "unconvincing in detail". Burgess dismissed "A Clockwork Orange" as "too didactic to