Under Mad Gods
Catch-22. By Joseph Heller. (Cape, 21s.)
The Crucified City. By Peter van Greenaway. (New Authors, 18s.) is always a catch—Catch-22: 'Catch-22 says and, instead of ending, it simply vanishes.
is ruthlessly enforced.
Epic in form, the book is episodic in struc- ture. Each chapter carries a single character a step nearer madness or death or both, and a step, too, into legend. The action takes place well above the level of reality. On leave or in action the characters behave with a fine dis- regard for the laws of probability. Yet they follow the law of Catch-22 and its logically necessary results. Within its own terms the book is wholly consistent, creating legend out of the wildest farce and the most painful realism, con- structing its own system of probability. Its characters are as boldly unlikely as its events, but when they die, they die with as much pain as any `real' men, and when they are dead, they are wept for with real tears. There is a scene in which Yossarian bandages the wounded leg of one of his crew, only to find that inside the man's flak-suit his vital organs have mortally spilled, a scene which is repeated again and again, each time with more detail and more dread. It acts as a reminder that Catch=22, for all its zany appearance, is an extremely serious novel. Against Catch-22 the man who does not wish to die has only his wits: war is not civilised, and to be caught up in it is to be reduced to a state of nature far worse than that visualised by Hobbes. Catch-22 is a book of enormous richness and art, of deep thought and brilliant writing.
If Catch-22 is one of the finest examples of the genre in which many of the best modern novels are written, that of the anguished farce (or, literally, the horror-comic), The Crucified City is from the school of unsmiling apocalyptic horror. Not that it is possible to find the de- struction of the world by H-bombs exactly risible. Mr. van Greenaway writes of a bomb which, falling over Colchester, destroys London. His characters meet fortuitiously amid the fires and rubble (described extremely well) and attempt a final pilgrimage to Aldermaston, a gesture before death from radiation sickness. They get about as far as Barker's, but distance travelled is not their object: rather, they strive
Yossarian, the coward, is a rational man try- think I may have been wrong about Roger
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