Anthony Burgess once wrote that the novel's literary singularity lay in "the tension between heroic form and unheroic content". In A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962, Burgess pushed this heroic tension to its limit. Set in a dystopian future where teenage gangs maraud nocturnally, carrying out random acts of "ultra-violence" at will, the novel relates the criminal exploits of Alex and his droogs (or friends) in a mock-heroic form reminiscent of Fielding's Jonathan Wild. Narrated entirely in the first person, the first half of the novel spools by in a tickertape stream of rape and murder before Alex is caught by the police and subjected to "Ludovico technique"  a scientific method to "cure" criminals of their violent urges through emetic brainwashing  and Burgess turns his satirical spotlight on the state's gelid violence.

The novel, and Stanley Kubrick's bravura 1971 film adaptation, were controversial for their supposed amoralism towards the sadistic violence depicted in the narrative, yet, as Burgess emphasised, his intention "had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground". This he accomplished through inventing a polyglot patois called "nadsat"  a virile concoction of cockney, Romany and Russian  in which the entire novel is written. Thus, Alex sets the scene for a gang brawl by declaring: "This would be real, this would be proper, this would be the nozh [knife], the oozy [chain], the britva [razor]."

Burgess's most ingenious inversion of the "youth in revolt" cliche is contained in his decision to endow Alex with a passion for classical music, especially Bach, Mozart and, above all, Beethoven. Ironically, though music spurs his protagonist to ever greater bloodlust, it is when depicting Alex's tonal transcendence that Burgess's prose attains an almost Joycean euphony. Alex's vision while listening to a violin concerto of "a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now" stands as sufficient testament to Burgess's preternatural ability as a linguistic stylist.