clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.

Basically, what the title is talking about is a person that behaves like a programmed toy or machine. The person has a mechanical set of morals and is essentially a robot, yet the person is in fact an actual biological creature. The story itself shows this concept through what happens to Alex. He is a character that for all intents and purposes has no moral reservations about anything. He rapes a ten year old, for example. He then goes through a behavioral brainwashing procedure that causes him to be sick at the mere thought of violence. This changes his entire behavior pattern, and he is essentially a reformed member of society. Unfortunately, his behaviors are not his. Alex has been programmed to behave that way. He essentially is acting the part of a robot despite the fact that he is a human organism.

The title refers to the Cockney saying "as queer as a clockwork orange". It means that something appears to be natural on the outside, but on the inside, it is actually artificial. The primary topics the novel deals with are the relationship between evil and free will, the state's role in human affairs, and what it means to be human. Alex is a naturally evil human being. The government, in attempting to control people's desires, try to rehabilitate Alex so that he chooses good over evil. Alex's attempt to be good is artificial because it isn't his true nature. A human's true nature comes from the inside. The artificial nature is forced on Alex from an outside force, the government.

It sounds like there are two parts to your query, so let’s take a good look at all you’re asking about. First, there’s a question about Burgess’s invention and use of the Russified slang spoken by Alex and his droogs and its relationship to the bleak dystopian future rendered in the novel and film. Then, you follow up on the title and ask how its meaning is depicted in Alex’s story. The best way to begin to answer your question is to consider some brief context for the novel’s genesis and the social conditions of England in the early 1960s.

The violent, oppressive future described in the novel is one in which the socialist policies of the liberal government have led to the rise of a Soviet-style, all-powerful state that robs individuals of their free will and humanity, as Alex’s journey represents, and Burgess’s brutally ironic allegory emphasizes the worst aspects of the system by suggesting with the absorption of Russian words into the youthful vernacular that the Soviet way has prevailed.

It is this dehumanizing effect of the propaganda and social engineering employed by the arms of state power to enforce docility and submission to the will of the state that Burgess symbolizes in the title image. The “orange” represents the vitality and abundance of the human individual, while the “clockwork” implies the mechanized determinism that the totalitarian state expects of its citizens to function as de-individualized cogs and gears within the system. Alex is such an heroic and sympathetic figure in both the film and novel because he is still a romantic defined by his love of life and music and beauty, as much as for his addiction to violence, that he is unwilling to surrender his authentic, human nature, destructive as it may be.

Though Kubrick’s film wasn’t released until a decade after the novel, it retained Burgess’s original satire and commentary on a complacent, consumerist society desensitized to state violence, a critique just as relevant in the Vietnam War era as it was in the early Cold War.