ISBN: 9780099477310
Date read: 13/06/2021
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
Support your local bookshop by going to Bookshop.org to buy your copy (instead of THAT online shopping website…)
‘ “I’m nuts. Cuckoo. Don’t you understand? I’m off my rocker. They sent someone else home in my place by mistake. They’ve got a licensed psychiatrist up at the hospital who examined me, and that was his verdict. I’m really insane.”
“So?”
“So?” Yossarian was puzzled by Doc Daneeka’s inability to comprehend. “Don’t you see what that means? Now you can take me off combat duty and send me home. They’re not going to send a crazy man out to be killed, are they?”
“Who else will go?” ’[1]
Yossarian has a problem. It’s the closing months of World War II and thousands of people he’s never even met are trying to kill him. Yossarian is part of a bomber squadron in the Twenty-Seventh Air Force Division, based on Pianosa, an island off the coast of Italy, and it’s their job to drop bombs on strategic enemy targets given to them by their higher ups. All they need to do is fly a set number of combat missions, then they can go home. Simple right? Well, not quite.
What starts out as a target of forty combat missions becomes forty-five, and when Yossarian flies his forty-five, that forty-five gets raised to fifty. And so on. Oh, and then there’s the catch:
‘…only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.’[2]
This is one of the many examples of the titular Catch-22 in action. It permeates the text at every turn and, as Howard Jacobson writes in his 2004 introduction to the novel, has ‘passed into the language, to stand for a situation which frustrates you by the paradoxical rules or circumstances that govern it, something that gets you whichever way you move, a sort of existential Sod’s Law,’[3] that keeps Yossarian and his pals flying bombing missions that could see them killed in action every time they board their B-25s and take to the sky. And as Yossarian starts to see his friends die horribly all around him, he begins to try all manner of schemes to get out of active duty.
Catch-22 is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It’s extremely rare to find a so-called ‘funny’ book that actually makes you laugh out loud. It is also one of the saddest. Heller’s invocation of the madness and nonsensical nature of the military chain of command is guaranteed to drive the reader as crazy as it does the book’s characters. The combination of screwball antics and the horrors of war perfectly complement each other, making both extremes all the better thanks to their contrasts with the other.
All of this while the binary formula of the Catch-22 is embodied by all aspects of the text. It pops up in single sentences, ‘The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likeable. In three days no one could stand him.’[4] It motivates the structure of the novel, with the events in the story being revealed to us in a cyclical, spiralling structure, where events get mentioned repeatedly, and each time from the perspective of different characters who reveal more and more of the event each time until the picture is completely painted for the reader.
The novel is vaudeville vortex of characters, who seems to swarm and multiply and are all given pretty much the same amount of time in the spotlight, meaning that the book doesn’t really have a central protagonist (the closest thing to one is probably Yossarian), but rather a colourful ensemble who all leave their own marks to one large canvas.
There’s Milo Minderbinder, who is using his position as mess officer to create an international, black market smuggling empire.
There’s Major Major Major Major, who’s doing whatever he can to elude any kind of responsibility his new promotion has afforded him, most likely given to him as a mistake caused by his first, middle and surnames.
There’s Nately, who’s madly in love with a whore who hates his guts and constantly cheats on him.
And then there’s Yossarian, whose main plight is recognised by few, but none more so than Major Major: ‘What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. what could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said that he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least as mature and intelligent as you were and who had to pretend he was not? What could you say to him?’[5]
Heller even manages to beautifully realize the pointlessness of war itself, of empires and of countries founded by men, through a short argument between Nately arguing with an elderly Italian man:
‘America is not going to be destroyed!’ he shouted passionately…
‘Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed…All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.’[6]
In the face of this fact, what is war then? What is the point of conflict when, over a long enough time span, you, me, our loved ones, everyone we’ve ever known, everywhere we’ve ever been and even the very planet we live on will be destroyed anyway?
And why shouldn’t we question what our own higher ups are telling us in our own lives? Heller’s masterpiece, its black-eye to the face of authority is as fresh and cutting as it ever was, and in light of recent world events, especially relevant to world events today. Even if you’ve never been in the military, the parallels to being unemployed, being put thought the legal system or wading through the paper and admin nightmare that comes with getting sick.
And there are even those higher ups in all of our daily lives, our own personal Colonel Cathcarts and Colonel Korns, General Scheisskopfs and General Dreedles. You know the ones. Those people who are also being exposed daily in the news media as having been breaking the very rules they set out themselves, for their own personal, material gain. Why shouldn’t we be letting these issues keep us up at night? Well, because, as the higher ups in Heller’s world put it:
‘Catch-22…says you’ve always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to.’
‘But Twenty-seventh Air Force says I can go home with forty missions.’
‘But they don’t say you have to go home. And regulations do say you have to obey every order. That’s the catch. Even if the colonel were disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions, you’d still have to fly them, or you’d be guilty of disobeying an order of his.’[7]
Oh, and let us never forget:
‘Look, fellows, we’ve got to have some confidence in the people above us who issue our orders. They know what they’re doing.’[8]
Yeah. Surely they know what they’re doing. So, do what General Lofkin tells you; go buy yourself a copy of Catch-22, read it before bed and sleep tight everyone.
[1] Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961, Vintage; London, p. 350
[2] Ibid, p. 52
[3] Ibid, vii
[4] Ibid, p. 10
[5] Ibid, p. 118
[6] Ibid, p. 279
[7] Ibid, p. 67
[8] Ibid, p. 374