Clockwork Orange

The narrator is a 15 year old who gets his kicks committing all kind of murder and mayhem with his friends. He also enjoys classical music. One woman they attack dies - but not until after calling the cops. He gets locked up in jail, where he generally acts the good guy - until he is provoked. One of these provocations results in him killing a new prisoner. This leads him to receive a treatment that will end his will to do violence. However, most of this treatment involves watching violent scenes accompanied by classical music. This, alas, results in classical music giving him the same ill feeling as violence.

After being set free, he returns home, only to find his room rented to a border, and all his stuff sold for restitution. He visits his old stomping grounds, only to get beat up by a bunch of old men he bullied earlier. The cops (who include one of his former buddies) take him away and beat him more. He eventually finds refuge with an author, who wants to use him as part of an anti-government propaganda. (He later learns that the author's wife had died to a beating from he and his friends.) He eventually tries to commit suicide, but survives, and finds the existing government trying to use him as a tool. Eventually, he ends the book as a mellower, older "man".

In the forward, the author complains that it is one of his inferior works, and that he doesn't like the movie which excluded the final chapter (which was excluded in the original American version of the book.) The book makes heavy use of a made-up slang (Nadsat). This adds to the flavor of the book and helps to tone down the violence. You can tell that he lives a life of all sorts of nastiness. However, you (as a reader) don't feel sucked in to it as you would with vivid modern language descriptions.

The message that is trying to be made is somewhat muddled. It seems to say that freewill is all important. Trying to reform society by restricting freewill is only replacing one evil with a worse one. However, the people that advocate this have their flaws - and attempt to restrict his freewill as a means to help bring about the downfall of the government. This muddling is seen in the modern society of today. People will often advocate "freedom of expression" for some issues, but on others attempt to regulate away others' freedom (because they think they know best.)