Catch-22
This is a review of the Caedmon unabridged audio-book version, as performed by Jay O. Sanders.
Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Somehow I managed to escape childhood, adolescence, and a stint in the Navy without being exposed to this classic.
Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian, a US Army Air Corps bombarier during World War II, and the absurd, murdurous cruelty of wars and the people who run them.
The cyclical nature of the novel can be a bit disconcerting, as the reader may feel, like some of the characters, that he’s been here before.
Yossarian spends much of the novel trying to avoid flying more (and still more) combat missions than are required by top-level orders, while his immediate superiors repeatedly raise the number of missions needed, in order for men to be rotated out.
While Yossarian and his fellow aviators deal with their demons, the commanders scheme to improve their own images, and Washington Irving, pointless death and Nately’s Whore seem to be lurking around every corner.
I realize this book was published decades before Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was released, but, since I was exposed to the two works in reverse order, I found the themes of bureaucratic absurdity and individual futility deeply reminiscent of Brazil.
The character of the central plot device, “Catch 22″, is revealed bit by bit, in seemingly unrelated situations, sometimes explixitly, and sometimes implicitly. The case of the dead man in Yossarian’s tent is a prime example of Catch 22 making an unannounced appearance.
All in all, Catch 22 is both darkly humorous and deeply sad. Yossarian seems to represent the struggle against imaginary constraints imposed by “so-called superiors”… like an elephant tethered to an inadequate stake by a flimsy rope or chain. The elephant has been conditioned to believe in the futility of struggle, and so, it does not struggle. Yossarian, too, spends much of the novel weakly tethered to norms and expectations he knows are insane, but he has been conditioned not to struggle against them.
Yossarian, though, is the aparently sane one in the bunch. He merely want to be left alone to live his life. He has no desire to hurt anyone. His world is populated by a wild array of megalomaniacs, introverts, weak innocents, tortutred souls, scheming savants, and self-serving climbers, and all but a precious few are busy telling him he’s insane, which he’s perfectly willing to admit, if it’ll get him out of flying more missions. …but there’s a catch. Catch 22.
As it turns out Yossarian thinks he’s the only sane one in war, but there’s one among his colleagues keeping his sanity a secret.
The Audio Book, performed by Jay O. Sanders is well done. Sanders’ mostly subtle voice characterizations help keep the vast cast of characters organized during the novel’s many involved passages of dialogue. The pace is good and the tone of the performance is consistent across the book’s 15 CDs.
The only thing that bugged me about Sanders’ performance was the way he pronounced around 30% of the “f”s in the book. It sounded like either 1) he normally wears dentures and forgot to put them in, or 2) he was trying not to pop the microphone with the “f”s. Trivial? Perhaps.
All, in all, I give this work a 4.5 out of 5 rating.