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Sixty-five years on, the most surprising thing about Catch-22 is how little of its reputation prepares you for the actual experience of reading it. The novel arrives pre-digested - its title has become everyday shorthand for a paradoxical dilemma, its anti-war credentials are settled history, and its place in the canon feels unassailable. Then you open it, and the book turns out to be far stranger, funnier and more exhausting than its cultural footprint suggests.

The premise is deceptively simple. Captain John Yossarian, an American bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island during World War II, interprets the entire war as a personal attack and becomes convinced the military is deliberately trying to send him to an untimely death, so he spends much of the book concocting ever more inventive ways of escaping his missions. The trap that gives the novel its name - you can be grounded if you're crazy, but asking to be grounded proves you're sane - is only the most famous of the bureaucratic snares Heller sets. Catch-22, as explained to Yossarian by Doc Daneeka, is just one of many roadblocks that obfuscate, impede, torment and kill the characters, which is why many read the book as more a critique of bureaucracy than of war. The military here is simply the purest available specimen of a system that devours its own people while insisting everything is proceeding according to regulation.

What elevates the book beyond clever premise is Heller's tonal control, which is really tonal whiplash deployed with intent. The novel's trademark is its unsettling humour - moments that make you laugh and then immediately reconsider why you're laughing. The man in white, a hospital patient completely bandaged, anonymous and forgotten, is both tragic and absurd at once. Laughter becomes a mask of defense, and the comic constantly winks at the tragic. By the final chapters, when the jokes fall away and the Rome sequence delivers its full horror, you realise the comedy was load-bearing all along - it was the only thing holding back what the book had been about from page one. This is satire the way black coffee is coffee: bitter, undiluted, and not for every palate.

And it genuinely is not for every palate, which deserves saying plainly. The book met with mixed reviews on publication, and the early complaints have never entirely gone away because they are not wrong, exactly. The book is long, and its material - the cavortings and miseries of a bomber squadron in wartime Italy - can feel repetitive and monotonous. Heller introduces so many characters and writes in such a variety of styles that the reader becomes a little dizzy. The circular dialogue, brilliant in small doses, gets run into the ground; the point about mad logic is well-made early, and the second half can start to feel predictable. The deliberately scrambled chronology, which loops back through the same events from shifting angles, demands a patience the novel does not always reward in the moment. A ruthless editor could have cut a hundred pages, and a fair number of readers abandon the book before discovering why the bloat might be the point - the repetition enacts the very entrapment it describes, grinding you down the way the system grinds Yossarian.

Whether that justification fully holds is an honest question. What is beyond dispute is the book's historical force. It marked a major departure from the austere realism that had dominated American war fiction, opening the floodgates for a wave of writing in which war was rendered in language as wild and grotesque as the real thing. With American involvement in Vietnam, the novel's popularity surged until it attained classic status - the right book arriving slightly before its moment, then defining it. And beneath the farce, Yossarian stands as a genuine literary hero of the individual spirit, a man whose cowardice, examined closely, looks a great deal like sanity.

So: a flawed masterpiece, with the emphasis shifting depending on the chapter you're in. Catch-22 is too long, too crowded and too pleased with its own routines, and it is also one of the most original and morally serious comic novels in the language. The two facts coexist without cancelling each other - which, given the subject matter, feels exactly right.