Writer who brought home horrors of war will be missed

Willy Maley says Heller's Catch-22 is the anti-conflict novel to beat them all Catch-22 is a novel about loss of faith, specifically a loss of faith in the state and its well-oiled war machine.

Cynicism about the reasons for fighting abroad to defend democracy at home isn't new. English soldiers bound for Ireland with Cromwell 350 years ago asked whether they'd be better establishing liberties at home than imposing tyranny overseas.Shakespeare put it bluntly, as always: "Busy giddy minds in foreign wars".

In Catch-22, we have a Jewish American writer mercilessly lampooning his country's contribution to a worldwide conflict in which millions perished, exposing incompetence, corruption and conspiracy.

By the time Catch-22 appeared, in 1961, the war it described was over, though its spectre was - and still is - haunting Europe, beefing up borders and promoting prejudice.

Catch-22 caught the mood of the 1960s and connected with the anti- war protests around Vietnam.

The novel's central character is an ambiguous figure, in keeping with the novel's underlying theme of being caught between a rock and a hard place.

Yossarian is of Abyssinian origins, and his name makes his superiors in the US Air Force doubt his patriotism: "What kind of name is Yossarian?" asks a n irate officer. "It's Yossarian's name, sir", comes the reply.

As an Abyssinian-American, Yossarian is suspended over an abyss, literally, when he is flying bombing missions that appear to conform to no logical pattern that he can discern.

Like all true citizens and internationalists, he is willing to fight against his country for the sake of his and others' freedom. Accused of unAmerican activities, he retorts: "The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on".

Catch-22 is more than a by-word for a generation, it's an apt description of our present state of mind. To be in two minds is to get with the programme, hard and soft. To be single-minded is to be simple- minded. I think, therefore I ambivalent.

Forget Caledonian antisyzygy, Jekyll and Hyde, and all those other manifestations of our national brand of cultural schizophrenia. In one monumental novel Joseph Heller captured the dilemma facing us in the wake of modernity.

But Heller links that schizophrenia to the bristling reality of societies dominated by the impreative of war. Milo Minderbinder, the American entrepreneur who sells supplies to the enemy without compunction, is not a million miles removed from our own government's mind-bending military manoeuvres.

One of the things Catch-22 did was to expose the economic imperatives behind war, the hidden agendas that have nothing to do with nationalism.

In the novel Heller - or Yossarian - hits this spot with two perfectly aimed surgical strikes. "Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the field to private industry." And later on, a very mortal one-liner. "Peace on earth would mean the end of civilisation as we know it". Heller, we'll miss you.

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.