I still remember the first time I read it. In fact, I remember vividly exactly how it begins and the words on that very first page that hooked me in for the next 500.
It took less than a handful of paragraphs for me to realise I was probably reading the greatest thing I had ever read, or ever would. Of course, the way any book grabs you depends as much on you as it does the writing and, with Catch-22, I knew I’d picked up the perfect book for me. And I’m not the only one who has had the same thought.
Catch-22 opens with its main character, Yossarian, in hospital with “a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice”. It goes on: “The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.”
How could you not keep reading after that? (I loved it so much that I changed my email address to something about jaundice then changed it back when someone pointed out it would not look very good on job applications — I was young and stupid).
Joseph Heller’s satirical novel, about a group of American soldiers in World War Two, is now more than 60 years old and coined the phrase “catch 22”, in the same way that George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, coined “room 101”. It has become a commonly-used phrase in the English language and refers to a dilemma from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting situations. To put it another way, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
In the book, it is best explained by the hope one of the characters, Orr, has to get out of a dangerous flying mission, which he thinks he can do on the grounds of insanity: “There was 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.”
I’m not sure there’s a better 100 words anywhere in the English language. In response, Yossarian says: “That’s some catch, that Catch-22” to which Doc Daneeka replies: “It’s the best there is.”
The novel is full of gems like that: there’s Dunbar, who is permanently trying to make himself as bored as possible so that it feels like his life is longer, and Major Major, who is so mediocre that “people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was”.
But while the novel might be manic and laugh-out-loud funny time and time again, it’s also a reflection on the absurdity of war, bureaucracy, humanity and plenty of other things, raising questions as relevant today as when it was written in 1961, just 16 years on from the end of the war.
“What is a country?” it asks at one point. “A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.”
Of course, with so many truly remarkable novels in the world, it’s impossible to pick “the best” so perhaps I should rephrase my selection as “the one I enjoyed the most”. But I’m not alone. The book has 350,000 five-star ratings on the Goodreads website. And in 2015, The Guardian ranked it 80th in its list of the 100 best novels ever written in English, just behind To Kill A Mockinbird and just ahead of A Clockwork Orange. The list was topped by A Pilgrim’s Progress.
It describes Catch-22 as an “acerbic anti-war novel” which was “slow to fire the public imagination but is rightly regarded as a groundbreaking critique of military madness”. And although Chris Cox, writing in The Guardian on the book’s 50th anniversary in 2011, said he “can’t remember another book which I’ve had to put down so frequently to get on with the serious business of guffawing”, he also calls the book “a merciless, absurdist comedy which hints at the awful emptiness at the heart of things”.
There is no book like Catch-22. You can buy it here. For the best books I’ve read in the last five years, you can read more here. And for more book recommendations, reviews and news, click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter, The Bookish Drop, on Substack.