Stanley Kubrick based his 1971 film on the American text. Norton restored the final chapter in 1987, bringing the American and UK editions into line with one another. Now Andrew Biswell offers a slightly revised text based upon the annotated typescript Burgess sold to McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) in 1967. This text, subtitled "The Restored Edition," has once again been published by Heinemann in the UK and by Norton in the USA--and once again the American and UK publications are far from identical.

Some things of course are the same: most of Biswell's introduction, the text of the novel itself, the notes, and the annotated pages from Burgess's typescript, plus the "epilogue," an additional piece by Burgess entitled "A Malenky Govoreet about the Molodoy." But otherwise each version offers a very different package of extras. The Norton edition includes another piece by Burgess, entitled "The Clockwork Condition," which the Heinemann version lacks. Conversely, the Heinemann version includes Burgess's prologue to his own 1986 stage adaptation of the novel, together with a Nadsat glossary, both missing from the Norton version. The Heinemann version also contains a foreword by Martin Amis and a set of essays, articles, and reviews excluded from the Norton version. About half of these additional pieces are by Burgess himself; the others are by Kingsley Amis, Malcolm Bradbury, Christopher Ricks, A. S. Byatt, and Stanley Edgar Hyman.

 

Probably the main reason the Heinemann text offers more is that Norton published its own "critical edition" of the novel back in 2011, which contains a large selection of background/contextual materials and critical commentary. Two of these pieces are included in the Heinemann text: Burgess's "Clockwork Marmelade" (awkwardly retitled "'Review' of Stanley Kubrick's Film" by Norton) and "Horror Show," Ricks's comparison of the novel and film. It is unfortunate that the Norton version of "The Restored Text" lacks Burgess's prologue, included in the Heinemann version. It is also unfortunate that the Heinemann version lacks "The Clockwork Condition," included in the Norton version. These selections, hitherto unpublished and perhaps the most remarkable of the extras, appear to be unavailable elsewhere. If you want both, you have to buy both the Heinemann and the Norton editions. Doubtless this was a calculated manoeuver on the part of the two publishers.

As for "The Restored Text" itself, some of the changes are interesting, but none is really substantive, and all of them seem to reflect Biswell's own preferences, not Burgess's. The only complaint Burgess ever had about the published text of the novel was Norton's choice to lop off the final chapter and to append a glossary; any other editorial changes were either made by Burgess himself or approved by him. While the facsimiles of selected typescript pages are a welcome treat, their chief interest lies in the marginal doodlings of clockwork oranges and the like, not in any textual emendations. In any case, the most significant annotation to the typescript was the comment at the end of part 3, chapter 6: "Should we end here? An optional 'epilogue' follows." As Biswell notes in his introduction, "it is clear from the 1961 typescript that Burgess's intentions about the ending of his novel were ambiguous from the start." But we don't need a whole "restored text" to tell us that, and the typescript page containing this marginal note has not been reproduced.