Length: 519 pages
Genre: Satire, war, dark comedy
The novel is mostly set on a US Air Force base on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa during the Second World War. Bomber pilot Yossarian and his comrades try to survive the horrors of war, not just from the enemy, but from the bizarre, contradictory, cruel and arbitrary military bureaucracy that controls their lives, and the inescapable, universal law of "Catch-22".
This is a long, rambling, episodic novel, shifting points of view between a large number of characters and jumping back and forth in time. The novel deals with the absurdity and horror of war and of military life, but expands that to include modern life in general. It's a deeply rich book that requires a lot of attention from the reader. There are lots of seemingly throw away jokes and references earlier in the novel that turn out to be important later on. A lot of it is extremely funny, but much of the comedy is humour of the darkest kind. It's tragic, comical, cynical, satirical and endlessly inventive. The book doesn't really have a strong plot, being more an account of various episodes in the lives of the characters. Heller revels in jokes, wordplay and paradoxes, which can make the book an overwhelming experience. When the book takes a shockingly darker turn towards the end it hits the reader like a bucket of ice water.
It's widely acclaimed as one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century and, while it may not be that, it is still a great book.
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