Closing Time

Catch-22, published in 1961, immediately became a classic. It captured the hilarious and tragic insanity of the times and galvanised the conscience of a generation.

Now, 33 years later, Joseph Heller has written the sequel. Closing Time revisits many of the characters, now older if not wiser, that made Catch-22 so unforgettable, in a novel as gloriously crazy as it is cruelly sane.

• Yossarian – suffering late-life depression at 68, still feisty and priapic as ever, is convinced he is under multiple-surveillance as New York degenerates into a peep-show of squalor and high-society voyeurism.

• Milo Minderbinder, now head of the dubious M&M Enterprises who, with his bureaucratically challenged son M2, is developing the ultimate Defensive Second-Strike offensive Attack Bomber, so radar-proof and noiseless that it doesn’t even exist.

• Chaplain Tappman, who is passing heavy water without a licence, whose increasingly toxic flatulence is causing grave concern and who may explode at any time, possibly causing the end of the world, which would be a Big Blow indeed to M&M who are busy trying to patent him with a Day-Glo halo as a trademark.

• Little Sammy Singer, giant Lew, all linked in uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End.

Closing Time is a stunning achievement, a work of breathtaking erudition, insight and inventiveness. It is chilling in its depiction of the moral collapse of the Western world as well as very funny in its black comedy. It will be viewed, like Catch-22, as one of the great American novels of all time.