Still probably the best novel about war ever written! Set during the last throes of the Second World War, Yossarian is not happy because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him! We follow his attempt to survive a crazy war without becoming crazy himself. As poignant now as the day it was written, Catch-22 is a hugely funny but gut-wrenchingly tragic classic. The title is now part of our everyday language. The use of it, as decription of the madness of the twentieth-century, has never been out of date. One of my favourite books of all time.

This is one of those books I've been meaning to read for a very long time and have at last done so. I'm glad I waited to be honest. If I'd read this in my teens or early twenties I think much of the seriousness would have been overshadowed by the madcap humour. It is very, very funny in a completely lunatic satirical way. From the daft names to the conversations between characters at odds with others, talking at cross purposes and making no sense whatsoever, to the chaotic scenes in the hospital with the 'soldier in white'!! Lunacy, utter absurdity but with a deeply profound and serious message running through the humour which really only makes its point with the revelation of what really happened to Snowden. It is this part of the book which is at the crux of it all. All the way through we meet incompetent leaders with skewed ambition and delusions of grandeur, all making nonsensical decisions that directly impact those on the ground and in the air who know what actually needs to be done - and that simply is to put an end the futility of that war and all the unnecessary deaths of the young fighting men who are nothing but fodder for the anti-aircraft flak. Yossarian and his friends (sometime enemies (McWatt and Orr spring to mind!)) desperately try to go home having fulfilled their mission quota only for the loonies in charge to move the goalposts again and again. It is with each successive quota increase that Yossarian's friends decrease in number, often in horrifically gruesome and disturbingly amusing ways. In this respect the humour adds gravitas to the plight of these men and makes for a more profound sense of loss. Snowden's situation is perhaps the most awful and truly tragic of them all and Yossarian's reaction to it is the impetus for his consequent actions - the not wearing of his uniform, marching backwards and his heartfelt remonstrations of 'They're all trying to kill me'. I should mention some of the daft names as they induced much merriment (the names and the characters) - Milo Minderbinder, Major Major Major Major (or is it five Majors?), as for the daft characters, well - Hungry Joe, Nately, the Chaplain, Orr and McWatt amongst so many others, their daftness so much more than just idiotic behaviour, more a cry for help never to be heard. Heller has, in this book, highlighted the idiocy of those in the upper ranks so far removed from the actual combat as well as the terrible toll on those doing the actual fighting and killing. He has used humour and satire to very great effect. In introducing new characters with each chapter and returning to certain events and people in the latter parts of the novel he underlines the profundity of Yossarian and cos predicament with style, albeit a brilliantly madcap one filled with some wonderful vocabulary that conjures some great imagery (this list is vast by the way) but one which springs to mind is: records were pullulating like insect eggs. Superb stuff. If you plan to read this do wait until your thirties, at least, as I have no doubt that it will make more sense with the attainment of something resembling wisdom.

Go on, ask why she was hitting him over the head...This is one very good book.The story revisits events again but from the point of view of the other characters. Events move onwards but the sheer madness of the situation is ever present. The final act of the doctor's wife is perfectly wonderful. The explanation of what 'Catch 22' actually means is another great passage and as for the sanity of a man who seems to crash his plane a little too often... well it's madness but there's method in it. The humour throughout makes this a rare book - one that made me laugh out loud and one that I will read again.

This is a moving sardonic tale about the absurdities of war. I found this book utterly compelling, in particular the way in which Heller brings the characters to life with great poignancy and humour.

After fifty years and ten million copies is there anything left to say? That depends on whether you believe that Catch-22 will be around for another fifty years and another ten million copies. If the answer is yes (and the answer is yes) then possibly the only thing worth saying is read this book, pass it on to someone and begin to comprehend how a phrase we use with the liberality of teabags (most weeks and often in batches) enjoyed its birth at the hands of a master storyteller, and why the book has been described as one of the most important books of the twentieth century. There's a Yossarian in all of us, along with the war he's engaged in and his attempts to remove himself from its idiocy. It's not in his nature to be involved in the killing of other people so his bombardier lifestyle and label do not sit happily on his war-weary shoulders. As Catch-22 opens he's sitting in a hospital bed under the watchful eye of Nurse Duckett and a game chaplain. He loves them both and he needs their understanding that he intends to sit out the war. This will not happen and Yossarian will, over the next few hundred pages, use a variety of methods to detach and set himself on a road to freedom. It's just that everyone else seems not to understand. Catch-22's characters have come from Bilko, Tom and Jerry, Abbott and Costello, and the pages of Alfred E Neumann's Mad Magazine. Their cartoon animation and two-dimensional ability to die over and over again would be laughable if it weren't so painfully and acutely well-observed and didn't bring home to all of us, for the millionth time, the futility of war and the madness of men. Major Major, Nately's whore, Snowden, Milo. The list goes on. Larger than life and excruciatingly accurate. Read Catch-22 and pass it on.