[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 the surface of the novel. Reading the book also involves a lot of back-and-forthing—that is, a word used in one context is given further meaning by its use in another context further on, which reflects back on its first usage. All this to-do on the linguistic surface of things blurs one's attention to the overall shape of the novel, and the scenes of gleeful sadism work to reinforce that desirable superficiality. It's a flat novel written in a thick, impasto style. The theme of music is integral to the novel, defined in this way; it makes for tonal unity on an immediate and impressionistic level, which is just another way of saying that the book is put together more like a movie than like a novel.

It is also a book, like those of Joyce, largely unconcerned with morality in any form. No doubt this was part of the reason for its popular success; it was an authentically cold book, at which a reader was entitled to shiver. Partly this was because of the society that Burgess envisioned, but partly also it derived from a personal artistic option within the book. One can almost feel the pathetic, beseeching figure of Poetic Justic imploring the novelist for admittance to his book and being roughly shouldered away. (p. 167)

Music in this novel … doesn't work in any logical way on the narration, nor is it an integral part of the plot, yet it's no less functional. In conjunction with the language, which is a major source of the book's vitality, it suggests a sphere of instinctual and uncorrupted response,… which contrasts with the asphalt jungle of the book itself. It's this intimation of the primeval and healthy barbaric, if only as a possibility within the corrupt, sick barbaric of the city slumster, that's distinctively Burgess and at the same time strongly Joycean.

Even more marked is the application of Joycean prose in a pure entertainment like Tremor of Intent. Burgess, like Joyce, is delighted by the linguistic patterns that form in the fading shadows of unconsciousness; and in this wholly implausible thriller, the most impressive and inventive passages are those where various characters … wander off for one reason or another into gaga-land, letting words, their sounds, and their associations take over for the common order of discourse, or imposing on them a whole new order of non-meanings…. [Though] it's only a dash of Joycean seasoning on books which are of a pretty common order, Burgess unmistakably uses that garnish, and not by any means to contemptible effect…. Burgess at the high point of his fictions escapes into Joycean language. (pp. 168-69)