Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

"That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

Let me start with the obvious – Catch-22 is the kind of book I have never read ever before, and in all probability, will not get to read since. It is a mad, crazy, insane, hilarious, acerbic, brilliant book brought forth through Joseph Heller’s mad, crazy, insane, hilarious, acerbic, brilliant writing. Okay, now that that’s out of my system, let me get down to the point.

Author Joseph Heller joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at the age of 19, shortly after graduating from high school. He was sent to Italy, where he few 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier in World War II. Not unsurprisingly, the celebrated novel’s central protagonist, Captain Yossarian, known as Yo-Yo among his friends, is also a bombardier with the Air Corps, is stationed in Italy, and has flown around 60 combat missions when the novel starts. But, where Heller got to return home after completing the said number of missions, Yossarian doesn’t get to do so. The “military bureaucracy” of the unit he belongs to keeps raising the number of missions one must fly, and always finds one way or another to keep Yossarian from returning home. His deep unwillingness to fly more missions makes him more and more defiant and rebellious, propelling him on a darkly comic collision course with the powers that be.

The Kafkaesque book is infested with a host of the most wacky, neurotic and unforgettable characters to complement our tragi-comic hero. And not to mention, their names are as unique as Yossarian’s. Thus there’s his friend Dunbar who too, like Yossarian, wants nothing else but to remain alive; there’s the paranoia-laden Colonel Cathcart, Yossarian’s commanding officer, who desperately wants make the frontpage of newspapers, and thus keeps extending the number of missions; there’s the self-serving Doc Daneeka who gets officially recognised as dead even when, behold, he’s still alive; there’s mess officer Milo Minderbender, literally the human personification of laissez-faire, who bombs the squadron he belongs to for the sake of the complex syndicate he runs which the Americans are as much the part of as the Germans are; there’s Chaplain Tappman, a kind and sensitive man forever tormented by his assistant Corporal Whitcomb; there’s Nately’s Whore, who keeps making outrageous efforts to kill Yossarian for informing her that Nately got killed in a mission; there’s Major Major Major Major, whose strict instruction to his assistant is that people be allowed to meet him at his tent only when he’s not there; there’s Lieutenant Schiesskopf, who’s only interest lies in parades, parades and more parades – these are just some of the most extraordinarily singular and absolutely hilarious characters populating the book, playing enormous roles in elevating it to a work of such high farce and making it a part of the pantheon of great nonsense literature.

The book abounds in humour – both slapstick and darkly comic, wit, ironies, wordplays, satires, deliberate logical fallacies, flashbacks and forwards, parodies, irreverence, idiosyncrasies, absurdism, literary paradoxes, pejoratives, solipsism, and cynicism. It has everything that the world of literature can offer, and more – and Heller must have had a delirious time composing the novel. Yet, for all its circular narrative, iconoclasm and seemingly “nonsense” humour, there’s also a subtle layer of grim humanism that runs through the book, which becomes more and more palpable as the story nears its climax. Because, one must realise, that at the end of the day, Catch-22 wasn’t merely a fun book; it was, and still remains, a devastating indictment against everything that bureaucracy stands for and signifies, and the absolute craziness, madness and insanity of the act of waging war.

The novel promptly and sharply divided the critics upon its publication in 1961. However, before long the Vietnam War started, and as it turned out to be one of the most insane and craziest wars that there could be, the book quickly captured people’s imaginations and was transformed into a cultural icon and a beacon for the anti-establishmentarian movement that defined that era. The book stood for everything that the bureaucrats, the political establishment, the military high command and the plutocrats didn’t, and vice-versa. It was a fierce and no-holes-barred blow right into the guts of anyone and everyone who belonged to the so-called higher echelons. In fact, an American cineaste I’ve been acquainted with over the blogosphere, who toured Vietnam on active duty, once told me, “Catch-22 is my favourite novel of all-time; I even took a paperback copy with me to Vietnam to help cope with the insanity of the whole situation”. That was the kind of power the book has and the intoxicating beauty of its prose and its “illogical logic”. For the record, the book has been rated as one of the 100 greatest novels of all time by The Observer, one of the 100 best English language modern novels by Time, and ranked 7^th in its list of the greatest English language novels of the 20^th century by Modern Library, among others.

Catch-22 is a not an easy read by any stretch of imagination. And if you’re a sensitive soul, it can also be extremely distressing in the way it seamlessly pokes fun at even the most sacred of aspects – religion, death, patriotism, love, despair – to the extent of even dehumanizing them. And in one of the chapters during the last leg of the book, Yossarian’s harrowing walk through a dilapidated, damaged, destroyed and demolished Rome can be as gut-wrenching as anything one might come across. Further, the elliptical narrative and the bravura, avante-garde writing style might seem an insurmountable wall to many. Yet, for all the difficulty that the book brings onto the table, it sure turned out to be one of the most exhilarating reads of my life.

"I'm cold," Snowden said again in a frail, childlike voice. "I'm cold."

"There, there," Yossarian said, because he did not know what else to say. "There, there."