Catch 22
Joseph Heller
478 pages
Published in 1961

The trouble with some novels is that they're more then just novels, they've become symbols. Catch 22 is more then an antiwar novel, it is the antiwar novel, which makes it difficult to talk about. The reality of the novel itself is obscured by our expectations, the images we have about it, by what we've read about the novel before we managed to read it ourselves. Of course, every book that stays around long enough runs that risk, but it's far worse when a book, like Catch 22 has done, so permeats popular culture. Even worse, such books become litmus tests to judge reviewers and readers by --ask any fantasy fan how difficult it is to honestly criticise the Lord of the Rings cyclus. So yeah, I feel a bit of pressure reviewing this novel, never mind that it's all in my head. I do want to leave a good impression, after all.

Catch 22: you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. Or in the "hero" of Catch 22, Yossarian's case, he must be insane to fly bombing missions but trying to let himself be declared insane and so get out of the war is the sane thing to do, so he can't be declared insane. Hence he has to stay at the frontline, flying an ever increasing number of bombing missions before he can go home and never quite making it before the quota is raised again.

Yossarian is the main character, but the way the book is built up is really as a series of short stories focusing on different members of th squadron and their own unique troubles. Each of these stories being embedded in the main story of Yosserian.

As an antiwar book, this could've been an incredibly depressing and realistic look at life in a World War II bomber squadron at the Italian front, full of men dying pointlessly. However, Joseph Heller had the good sense to transform it into a piece of absurdistic theatre. Heller's wit is razorsharp, his view of humanity is bleak: nobody in the entire book really seems to care about anybody else, with the exception of the bashful and totally useless chaplain. By keeping the emphasis on the ridiculous though it takes a long time for the cynicism to seep through. But when it does, it hit me like a sledgehammer. It took a while before I felt ready to read on, whereas the first half or so I read in less then a week.

I'm glad I've read it, but I won't be rereading this soon.