Catch-22

First published in 1961, Heller’s withering satire continues to hit its target today. The novel marshals and exposes farcical bureaucracy, logistical confusion and a freak show of officers as dangerous as they are absurd: Major Major, the reclusive squadron commander who is bullied by his own men; the sadistic Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions required to complete a tour of duty; and the shameless capitalist Milo Minderbinder, who isn’t averse to bombing his own base in the name of profit. Watching in bewilderment as, one by one, his friends are killed in action, is Yossarian, the ultimate anti-hero, who resorts to ever more desperate measures to save himself from the same fate.

‘That’s some catch, that Catch-22,’ he observed.

‘It’s the best there is,’ Doc Daneeka agreed.

Fighting just a generation after ‘the war to end all wars’, the bitter irony isn’t lost on the American squaddies at the air base on the island of Pianosa. Heller’s carefully drawn characters (the novel took eight years to complete) ponder the absurdity of their situation while continuing to play their roles in a daily game of chance.

From screwball comedy to extreme horror, Catch-22 – as no other novel before or since – captures the manic energy and madness of war. For Heller, the base is also a microcosm of America; the war a particularly violent and degrading version of ‘peacetime’. This skilful merging of horror, pathos and black humour could make illustration a challenge, but not in the masterful hands of Neil Packer, who had previously worked on Folio books including The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. His eight instinctively grotesque poster-inspired colour illustrations transform this cult classic into a stunning illustrated edition: an essential addition to any contemporary fiction collection.

Malcolm Bradbury was born in 1932 in Sheffield. He attended West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham and then the University of Leicester and Queen Mary’s College in London. In 1959 he began a PhD in American Studies at Manchester University and published his first novel, Eating People is Wrong. This was also the year that he began his teaching career, first at Hull University and then the University of Birmingham and the University of East Anglia, where he set up the renowned creative writing course with Sir Angus Wilson. His novels include The History Man (1975), which won the Heinemann Award, Rates of Exchange (1983) and To the Hermitage (2000). Bradbury also wrote radio and television plays and adapted novels for television. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and was awarded a CBE in 1991. He died in 2000.