There's a catch

When Catch-22 was first released 50 years ago last October, the reviews ranged from the uncomprehending to the perceptive.

Nelson Algren wrote that Catch-22 ''was not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it was the best American novel to come out of anywhere in years.''

Joseph Heller's monumental novel has now sold more than 20 million copies and speaks to everyone who thinks there's more to life than death.

Heller chose the American Air Force in World War II as the stage to release one of the great metaphors in modern literature - ''a satirical microcosm for many of the macrocosmic idiocies" one critic called it.

Catch-22 is populated by squadrons of madly eccentric, cartoon-type characters whose antics were far loonier than anything ever seen before in war fiction - or, for that matter, in any fiction.

It was black comedy - disturbing and subversive. In my callow youth the book was my personal 400 page 'Sermon on the Mountain' on the madness of organisations. Little did I know how prophetic Heller was.

Heller was saying something outrageous - not just about the idiocy of war -but about our whole way of life and the system of false values on which it was based. The horror he exposed was not confined to the battlefield or the bombing missions but permeated the entire labyrinthine structure of establishment power.

You don't read much about the uses and abuses of power these days. Cruelty and madness are news currency now. Fair dealing and decency seem quaint. The Catch-22 says we are not born mad; we have madness thrust upon us.

The opening figure of the soldier in white, whose bodily fluids are endlessly drained back into him, the soldier who sees everything twice, the constant raising of the required number of bombing missions, all point to a world where the moral compass is spinning madly.

Catch-22 found expression in the most completely inhumane exploitation of the individual for trivial, self-serving ends and the most extreme indifference to the official objectives that supposedly justified the use of power.

Yossarian makes Josef K out of Kafka's The Trial look like a school crossing monitor. Only the wise Slaughterhouse Five by Heller's close friend Kurt Vonnegut comes close. So it goes.

Who hasn't done battle with a psychotic boss? Who hasn't sat befuddled and angry dealing with asinine bureaucracy? Can't get a job because you're too young? Can't get a job because you're too old? Welcome to the Catch-22.

"Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to." It's the best catch there is.

Heller had done his homework on logic problems. He would have known about Morton's Fork: John Morton was the Lord Chancellor of England in 1487, under Henry VII. He said if the subject lived in luxury he had enough to pay tax. If the subject lived frugally, he must have squirreled some savings and could therefore pay tax. Whichever way you turn, you lose.

Heller knew about Double Bind problems too: a classic example of a negative double bind is of a mother telling her child that she loves him while at the same time turning away in disgust. The child doesn't know how to respond and because it is dependent on the mother for basic needs, so it falls in to a terrible quandary. Welcome to the Catch-22.

The hippies could see the Catch-22 during the Vietnam War. It's the madness of B52 strikes, of burning villages to save them. It's Dr Strangelove's 'No fighting in the war room', and we still follow this river of thought in modern classic war films such as Full Metal Jacket which put a new take on the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

There were bad guys in the book but none worse than Colonels Korn and Cathcart. They were evil personified. They just wanted Yossarian to like them, to buy in to the program, to sell his soul, as they raised the number of missions. One of my favourite lines: "The Colonel was certainly not going to waste his time and energy making love to beautiful women unless there was something in it for him."

The book was widely recognized as a deadly accurate metaphorical portrait of the nightmarish conditions in which America was engulfed in the 50s and 60s. There were the fiascoes of the Eisenhower Presidency, the Korean War, the sordid inquisitions of the McCarthy era and the Rosenberg executions.

We have similar fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan and with our refugee policy. I can't remember how many places across the world Australian troops are fighting and dying.

50 years later, we can see that the situation Heller describes has, if anything grown more complicated, deranged and perilous than it was in 1944 or 1961 or 2011.

Catch-22's black humor, surrealism and grotesque metaphors dramatised the unreality yet there is a faint glimmer of hope at the end of the book with the story of Orr, but it's very faint.

But don't let it get you down. Just remember, "Anything worth dying for, is certainly worth living for."