When I was 16 or 17 we read Catch-22 in English class and because I was a 16 or 17 year-old boy — and because it's brilliant — I loved it. My enthusiasm must have been palpable because my teacher gave me a copy of J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur, set in a fictional colonial outpost during the Indian Rebellion (or "Mutiny" as she would have said) of 1857, and suggested I do a compare-and-contrast on the two novels. I probably wrote about how a rich vein of black-comic absurdity runs through both of them, and how they're both about people going mad in confined spaces — an army base in one, a colonial cantonment in the other — in the midst of death and indecency. I probably didn't make much of Siege's discussion of the nature of civilisation and the relative worth of faith and reason, words and deeds, and definitely not of its unflinching post-mortem of the (British) colonial project. (Incidentally I think Catch-22 can also be read through a colonial lens). I don't remember being quite as smitten with Siege as with Catch back then, perhaps because it forwent the cartoon anarchy and balls-to-the-wall yank attitude of the latter in favour of a more phlegmatic, British kind of humour. But I did enjoy it, and doing so made me feel grown-up in a way a book hadn't before.
