[Like] Joyce, and like no other novelist in English, Burgess is fond of using language harmonically or impressionistically, and not just in nostalgic moods—he likes to strip words of their representational values and use them for their tonal values. This was apparent almost from the beginning. Without its special dialect, A Clockwork Orange would be not only a sparse but a muddled book, with its bare bones in evident disarray. (p. 166)

But the dialect of the novel performs several services for this rather crude fable. Being relatively opaque, it absorbs a lot of attention in its own right; it's a rich mixture of Russian conflated with English, Romany, rhyming slang, and Burgess-coinages, so that initially a lot of the meanings have to be guessed from the contexts. The reader is thus kept well occupied, not to say distracted; a good deal of his attention goes simply to...