I recently re-read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 novel and was surprised to discover that there was a television series based upon it. I did see the film that was released in 1970 and remember Alan Arkin making a rather good John Yossarian, but I have not been able to watch it again so I will leave the film to one side for the purposes of this post.

Although Joseph Heller never attributed any great importance personally to Catch-22 it is his most successful novel, both commercially and in popular culture. The reference to the existence of a Catch-22 proposition is commonplace, although often used without definition. Simply put, and based on the one used by Heller, Catch-22 is that a member of an aircrew would be mad to fly another bombing mission, but only a sane person would know that, therefore, a mad person would not ask to relieved of their duties; only a sane man would. Using this interpretation Dr Daneeka could never use his authority to ground a person for being insane if they asked to him to do so. It is perhaps the best known example of the absurdities of war, but the novel contains a lot more of them.

In essence the novel, Catch-22, is a satire based on the simple principle that war is absurd in every respect. The protagonist, John Yossarion, aka Yo-Yo, spends his whole time trying not be killed, and arguing with his colleagues and friends that everyone is out to kill him, a fact that they do not have a problem with because in war that is exactly what happens. It has many comic moments that range from the surreal to the outrageous, and even touching the blackest humour of the human condition. One of its main themes is the upward push of senior officers, such as Colonel Cathcart, for promotion and how they will resort to any method to get themselves noticed by the people who award advancement; such as constantly raising the number of missions to be flown before personnel are sent back home, usually just as Yossarian almost reaches the total required.

I can accept that any form of adaptation of a novel is going to necessitate compromises. No work moves from one medium to another without something being lost, or something added, or both. The problem for me with the television series produced by George Clooney is that it lost sight of the fact that Catch-22 is a satirical comedy. One example of this is the representation of Col. Cathcart and Lt. Col. Korn. In the novel, Lt. Col. Korn wants to be promoted to full colonel, so he helps his boss, Col. Cathcart, in his aspirations to be promoted to general. They go to great lengths to impress their direct superior, General Dreedle, as a result, but this does not appear in the television series. Instead, Col Cathcart is played as a bully. His repeated decisions to raise the number of missions results from a sadistic desire to punish his men, not a sycophantic desire to catch General Dreedle’s eye. In the book, Lt. Col. Korn is quite a Machiavellian character, smarter than Cathcart, and the originator of the Diabolical Plan that is offered to Yossarian as a means of getting rid of him as a disturber of the peace within his squadron and the larger air group. In the television series, Korn is nothing more than Cathcart’s lapdog and the Diabolical Plan is reduced to a gentleman’s agreement between Cathcart and Yossarian only, and this leads to the far from satisfactory conclusion that is entirely at odds with that which Heller wrote.

Many of Yossarian’s relationships suffer from the result of this being a mini-series of limited length unfortunately. In particular, his friendship with Orr that is barely explored, more time being given to Nately, McWatt, and Milo Minderbinder. Sadly, the character of Dunbar, Yossarian’s hospital wingman, appears so briefly as to be unnoticeable. Also, Orr’s solution to Yossarian’s problem of how to avoid being killed for the duration of the war is relegated to a couple of sentences of dialogue. It cannot serve as a get-out clause to the Diabolical Plan because that has been rendered redundant, which is probably why the writer came up with the alternate ending that contradicts the whole point of the book.

The television series is beautiful to look at and superbly acted, but it is only a veneer of what Heller achieved in his novel. In their attempts to reduce such a powerful book to a television programme it appears that they misunderstood the main themes and the very nature of Heller’s work as a satirical comedy about how war is often worked for the benefit of the individual at the cost to the collective, and that greed and ambition can still be accommodated to the point where each side pays money for the pleasure of attacking each other, which was one of Milo Minderbinder’s brilliant contracts signed by M&M Enterprises Syndicate on behalf of the United States Army Air Corps and the German forces in Northern Italy. For some reason that level of stupidity and absurdity just never surfaced. My preference will remain firmly with the novel.