Plan B Forum

For months, they filled my head, those US military men and women in a bomber squadron off Italy during World War II.

Yossarian; Nurse Duckett; Nately and his whore; Major Major Major Major; Milo Minderbinder, the mad entrepreneur who sold chocolate-covered cotton; and many more. I marvelled, I was horrified, I laughed my head off. Decades later, when I've forgotten most other books I read at the time, they stay with me.

No wonder Joseph Heller's brilliant and savage satire, Catch-22, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, is frequently on lists of the best novels of the 20th century, or even of all time. Yet when it came out in 1961, it had a very mixed reception, won no awards and didn't sell well.

The New York Herald loved it: "A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book." But The New Yorker didn't: ". . . doesn't even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper." And it wasn't until months later, when Catch-22 was published in Britain and then as a paperback, that it really took off.


Now it's an undisputed classic that has added an expression to the English language. "Catch 22" is the bureaucratic rule that any man who willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions must be insane. But if he asks to be removed from duty, he has to stay, because his request has proved him sane.

Crazy, sinister and impressive: when Yossarian, the reluctant bombardier and anti-hero, first hears this rule, he lets out a respectful whistle. From then on, he is convinced the military is trying to kill him. And whoever is trying to kill him is the enemy.

So this was the book that led the way for so many subversive, countercultural novels of the 1960s and '70s that showed up the madness of authority and its bureaucracy, hypocrisy and bullying.

The book was based on Heller's experience as a bombardier in World War II, though he maintained that his war wasn't particularly interesting. It took seven years to write and he was almost 40 by the time success came to him.

He'd given himself an impossible act to follow, though he believed, along with one or two critics, that his later novel Something Happened was a better book. Nevertheless, it's Catch-22 that has gone down, as his biographer Tracy Daugherty puts it, as "the bible of American black humour".

Random House has marked the anniversary with a special edition, including a new introduction by Christopher Buckley, personal essays by Heller on how the novel was born, critical responses by Norman Mailer and others, papers and photos from Heller's personal archive and advertisements from the original publishing campaign.

There are also two new books about Heller: a memoir from his daughter Erica Heller, Yossarian Slept Here, and Daugherty's biography, Just One Catch.

Heller, who died in 1999, was an advertising man and in a reference to the television series Mad Men, Erica calls her father Don Draperstein. She remembers that when Catch-22 was finally taking off, her parents would take a cab late at night and ride round the bookstores to see the piles of books in store windows. That made them feel giddy.

Erica has tried many times to read Catch-22 but has never got to the end of it, perhaps put off by the looping time frames and repetition. I hope today's readers will be more persistent. It's a wonderful, rollicking nightmare of a read that is still all too topical.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-a ... z1WGwxgfrY