William Boyd

William Boyd on Writers Who Inspired Him

The novelist William Boyd tells us about the authors, from Chekhov to Heller, who most influenced his own development as a writer – and reveals the secret to a well-crafted sex scene

After writing 17 novels, do you feel as inspired now as you did 20 or 30 years ago?

Yes, I do actually. Funnily enough, I feel in the last three of four years a new surge of energy. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m getting older, but I actually feel I’m working harder than I’ve worked ever before in my life. I seem to have so many things on. It’s not by any great intent, it’s just the way things have panned out.  I can’t write for as long as I used to. I used to write for five hours a day and now I’m down to about three. But I do feel very creatively energised as I approach my 60th birthday, which is reassuring. It’s strange how these things happen. It’s not just new novels, I’m also writing short stories and for film and television. I feel very busy and I enjoy that. I don’t feel under any pressure so obviously the brain is still working well.

Book Review 080 / Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

 

Catch-22 

by Joseph Heller 

[A Review]

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 80 / Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

Jason Fernandes

Catch-22 is a brilliant novel and my personal favourite. True to the themes at its core, its style is frustratingly unique, its message is absurdly sensible and its tone is depressingly hilarious.

Michael Connelly
Photo by Miriam Berkley

Michael Connelly's Top Ten List

Hide

Michael Connelly (born 1956) is an American author of detective novels and crime fiction best known for his series featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and another featuring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His bestselling books have been translated into dozens of languages. After working for years as crime reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, he published his first novel, The Black Echo, in 1992, which introduced Bosch. Other novels in the series include The Black Ice (1993),The Closers (2005), The Black Box (2012) and The Burning Room (2014). The Haller series (several of which feature Bosch) includes The Lincoln Lawyer(2005), The Brass Verdict (2008) and The Gods of Guilt (2013). Connelly has won almost every major award given to mystery writers in the United States - including the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Macavity Award and the Nero Award – and many international awards, including the Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), Grand Prix Award (France) andPremio Bancarella Award (Italy).

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). Perhaps the most searching fable of the American Dream ever written, this glittering novel of the Jazz Age paints an unforgettable portrait of its day — the flappers, the bootleg gin, the careless, giddy wealth. Self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby, determined to win back the heart of the girl he loved and lost, emerges as an emblem for romantic yearning, and the novel’s narrator, Nick Carroway, brilliantly illuminates the post–World War I end to American innocence.

2. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939). Hollywood is not alluring in this savage, apocalyptic novel about fame and its perversions. Painter Tod Hackett comes to Hollywood to design sets and find success. Instead, he finds a population of the physically and psychically maimed crouching at the edges of the film industry, desperately believing that only luck and time separate them from stardom. At the end, their disappointment explodes into violence and Tod sums up his despair with his single great painting: The Burning of Los Angeles.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). Tomboy Scout and her brother Jem are the children of the profoundly decent widower Atticus Finch, a small-town Alabama lawyer defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. Although Tom Robinson’s trial is the centerpiece of this Pulitzer Prize–winning novel —raising profound questions of race and conscience —this is, at heart, a tale about the fears and mysteries of growing up, as the children learn about bravery, empathy, and societal expectations through a series of evocative set pieces that conjure the Depression-era South.

4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (1962). In Ken Kesey’s first novel, the insane asylum becomes an allegory for the larger world as the patients are roused from their lethargy by the arrival of Randall Patrick McMurphy, a genial, larger than life con man who fakes insanity to get out of a ninety-day prison sentence. By the time McMurphy learns that he is now under the cruel control of Nurse Ratched and the asylum, he has already set the wheels of rebellion in motion. Narrated by Chief Broom Bromden, an Indian who has not spoken in so long he is believed to be deaf and mute, McMurphy’s rebellion is a spectacular foretelling of what the 1960s were to bring.

5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1962). After flying forty-eight missions, Yossarian, a bomber pilot in World War II, is going crazy trying to find an excuse to be grounded. But the military has a catch, Catch 22, which states, (a) a sane man must fight, unless (b) he can prove he is insane, in which case (a) must apply —for what sane person doesn’t want to avoid fighting? This novel is a congery of appallingly funny, logical, logistical, and mortal horrors. It defined the cultural moment of the 1960s, when black humor became America’s pop idiom.

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940). Hemingway’s ambivalence toward war —its nobility and its pointlessness —are delineated in this account of Robert Jordan, an idealistic American professor who enlists with the antifascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Jordan’s idealism is quickly tested by the bloody reality of combat and the cynical pragmatism of his comrades.

7. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953). Chandler’s sardonic and chivalric gumshoe Philip Marlowe winds up in jail when he refuses to betray a client to the Los Angeles police investigating the murder of a wealthy woman. Marlowe’s incorruptibility and concentration on the case are challenged even more when the obsessively independent private eye falls in love, apparently for the first time, with a different rich and sexy woman. She proposes marriage, but he puts her off, claiming he feels “like a pearl onion on a banana split” among her set.

8. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969). Part science fiction, part war story, this is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a former World War II prisoner of war who survived the firebombing of Dresden, as did Vonnegut himself. Abducted by visitors from the planet Trafalmadore, Pilgrim comes “unstuck in time” and is thus able to revisit key points in his life and even his future. Written at the height of the Vietnam War, this muscular satire reveals the absurdity and brutality of modern war.

9. The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1976). It is 1953 and Russian spies are everywhere, according to Fightin’ Joe McCarthy. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are scheduled to fry in the electric chair in Times Square, and Uncle Sam has delegated Vice President Richard Nixon (who narrates much of the story) to ensure that the show goes off. Coover is a master of lingos, from Uncle Sam’s Davy Crockett yawps to Nixon’s resentful Rotarian tones. Oddly, Tricky Dick comes off as a rather endearing soul, a 1950s Everyman helplessly folded, spindled, and mutilated in Coover’s funhouse mirrors.

10. Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain (1941). After shedding her philandering, unemployed husband, Mildred Pierce works menial jobs to support her two children before discovering a gift for making and selling pies in Depression-era California. She’s a strong woman with two fatal flaws —an attraction to weak men and blind devotion to her monstrously selfish daughter Veda. These weaknesses join to form a perfect storm of betrayal and murder in this hard-boiled tale.

THE TOP TEN

James Joyce

The 10 best… closing lines of books

The most memorable literary payoffs, from the chilling to the poetic

Robert McCrum
Sunday 29 July 2012

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Fitzgerald hypnotises successive generations of readers with this tale. Nick Carraway's signing off after the death of Gatsby is my favourite last line in the Anglo-American tradition – resonant, memorable and profound. It hovers between poetry and the vernacular and is the magnificent chord, in a minor key, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close. Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, in tone as much as meaning, while giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.

Ulysses by James Joyce

BIOGRAPHY

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Joyce is the master of the closing line and this is his most famous and most suggestive. Compare it with the end of The Dead, his short story that concludes Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Middlemarch by George Eliot

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Middlemarch is many readers' favourite Eliot novel, with so many quotable passages. This passage is almost a credo – a lovely, valedictory celebration of Dorothea's quiet life, after she has renounced Casaubon's fortune and confessed her love for Ladislaw.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

Conrad's merciless short novel (fewer than 40,000 words) opens on the Thames and ends there, too. The last line of Marlowe's astounding confession is an admission of his complicity in the terrible events he has just described as a reluctant witness. It also executes a highly effective narrative diminuendo in an extraordinary fictional nightmare. Compare George Orwell's chilling return to the status quo in another nightmare, Nineteen Eighty Four: "He loved Big Brother."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." 

This is a heartbreaker. Twain rounds off his masterpiece by saying that Huck Finn is fated, like all Americans, to an incessant quest for the challenge of the frontier. For sheer teenage disaffection, it's matched by the last line ofCatcher in the Rye: "Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." And also from the US, let's not forget Margaret Mitchell's ending to Gone With the Wind: "After all, tomorrow is another day." Pure hokum, like the novel.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision." 

And she has. Lily's closing words complete the circle of consciousness.Virginia Woolf was good at last lines and was always a decisive closer. Mrs Dalloway, whose first line famously has Woolf's protagonist buying the flowers herself, ends with: "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." That's the perfect conclusion, to a nervy climax, nailed in nine words.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off." 

The spirit of Bugs Bunny inspires the finale of Yossarian's adventures with 256th Squadron. It's the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does, and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed, because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed, undone, overthrown, or denounced. But here, finally, he can become free.

Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

"There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady's bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has

A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality. Contrast the incoherent end of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, "No got … C'lom Fliday."

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Brontë's masterpiece is often cited for its gothic morbidity and intoxicating romantic darkness, but here – stepping back from the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine – the novel displays an acute evocation of Yorkshire combined with memorable poetic grandeur. This note of redemption promises a better future in the union of Cathy and Hareton.

The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter

"But Tom Kitten has always been afraid of a rat; he never durst face anything bigger than – A Mouse."

Children's books should not be overlooked. Potter earns her slot with this chilling, but playful, ending to a spine-tingler by a writer who loved to explore the world of juvenile suspense. Perhaps in honour of the late Maurice Sendak we should also mention "And it was still warm", the payoff to Where the Wild Things Are. And JK Rowling has a well-earned closer toHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: "The scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well."

THE GUARDIAN

The 100 best novels / No 80 / Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 80

Catch-22 

by Joseph Heller (1961)

This acerbic anti-war novel was slow to fire the public imagination, but is rightly regarded as a groundbreaking critique of military madness

Robert McCrum
Monday 30 March 2015 05.45 BST

I

n 1962, writing in the Observer, Kenneth Tynan saluted Catch-22 as “the most striking debut in American fiction since Catcher in the Rye.” Within a year, he had been joined, in a chorus of praise, by writers as various as Harper Lee, Norman Mailer and Graham Greene. More than 50 years later, this brilliant novel still holds an unforgettable comic grip on the reader.

“It was love at first sight,” Heller begins, setting the tone for everything that follows. “The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

Bombardier Yossarian is in a military hospital with a pain in his liver that’s not quite jaundice. Hinting at the famous “catch” of the title, Yossarian can be treated if he’s got jaundice, but discharged if he hasn’t. If neither, then he’s in a Kafkaesque limbo, where he’s at the mercy of fate.

This anticipates the notorious conditions under which a combat airman can be grounded: you have to be insane before you’re excused flying combat missions, but if you don’t want to fly any more missions that proves you are not insane. The OED defines this “Catch-22” as “a difficult situation from which there is no escape, because it involves mutually conflicting or dependent conditions”, which is a very dull way to describe the absurd crux whose mad logic exhilarates every page of one of the greatest war novels of all time.

Bombardier Yossarian, who is at odds with his own side as much as with the enemy, is an unforgettable second world war Everyman, whose cat-and-mouse relationship with a cast of deranged oddballs – Milo Minderbinder, Major Major and Doc Daneeka – is played out, amid mounting absurdity, on the island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean. It’s 1944, and Yossarian has figured out that “the enemy is anybody who is going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on”.

Inevitably, the high comedy with which the novel opens eventually modulates into a darker, bleaker humour, and movingly, it’s the tragic death of rear-gunner Snowden which reminds us that Heller’s merriment is the kind of gallows laughter that’s inspired by the horror of war.

A note on the text

Heller first began to write the novel that became Catch-22 in 1953, while working as a copywriter in New York. Once he’d found the famous opening – “It was love at first sight” – he had the voice he needed for the narrative.

The rest followed slowly in manuscript, and by 1957 he had about 270pp in typescript. Eventually his literary agent Candida Donadio sold an incomplete version of Catch-22 to Simon & Schuster, where it was taken up with enthusiasm by a young editor, Robert “Bob” Gottlieb, who would eventually move to Alfred A. Knopf. Gottlieb, who is now retired, after a distinguished career that included editing the New Yorker, oversaw all aspects of the novel’s appearance, and was instrumental in its launch. Heller later dedicated the novel to him as a “colleague”.

Gottlieb’s enthusiasm inspired him to send out advance copies, a strategy that (as so often) did not always work. Evelyn Waugh wrote back: “You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches – often repetitious – totally without structure.”

Structure aside, the main pre-publication debate was to do with Heller’s title, which had at first derived from the opening chapter of the novel, published in magazine form (next to an extract from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), as Catch-18in 1955. Subsequently, Candida Donadio requested a change in the title, to avoid confusion with another recently published second world war novel, Mila 18 by Leon Uris, who was a bestselling literary name at the time.

Initially, Catch-11 was proposed, but then the release of the Hollywood movieOcean’s 11 (1960) raised more anxieties, and this was also rejected. So was Catch-17 (deemed too similar to the film Stalag 17), and also Catch-14. Apparently, Simon & Schuster did not think that “14” was a “a funny number”. Eventually author, agent and publisher settled on Catch-22.

Joe Heller’s first novel was officially launched on 10 October 1961, priced $5.95 in hardcover. The book was not a bestseller in hardcover in the US. Despite selling 12,000 copies before Thanksgiving, it never entered the NYT bestseller list. However, Catch-22 got good notices (and bad: Heller later said that “the disparagements were frequently venomous”).

There were positive reviews from the Nation, which saluted “the best novel to come out in years”; the Herald Tribune (“A wild, moving, shocking, hilarious, raging, exhilarating, giant roller-coaster of a book”), and the New York Times (“A dazzling performance that will outrage nearly as many readers as it delights”). Elsewhere, for example in the New Yorker, there was critical rage: attacks on a book which “doesn’t even seem to be written; instead, it gives the impression of having been shouted onto paper... what remains is a debris of sour jokes”.

Nevertheless, it was nominated for the National Book Award, and went through four printings in hardcover, selling especially well on the east coast. The book never established itself nationally until it was published in paperback, and benefited from a national debate about the pointlessness of the Vietnam war. Abroad, Heller had better luck, and in the UK his novel did become a bestseller. During the 1960s, the book acquired a cult following, especially among teenagers and college students. Although Catch-22 won no awards, it has remained consistently in print and, since publication, has sold more than 10m copies.

Three more from Joseph Heller

Something Happened (1974); Good As Gold (1979); God Knows (1984).

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH

000 The 100 best novels: an introduction by Robert McCrum

001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)

003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson  (1748)

005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  (1749)

006 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)

010 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1833)

011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli  (1845)

012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  

015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

018 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)

020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

022 The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome  (1889)

026  The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

027  The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

028  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)

031 Dracula by Bram Stoker  (1897)

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)

037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

055 As I Lay Dying  by William Faulkner  (1930)

070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell  (1949)

071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene  (1951) 

072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)

073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)

074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)

075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)

078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

079 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)

080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) 

082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)

083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964) 

084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966) 

086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)

087 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971)

088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)

089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) 

091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)