War isn’t funny, obviously. Soldiers fighting and dying; the killing of civilians by accident or design – all very not funny.



But there is another side to war: the behind-the-scenes confusions, the absurdities of large organisations, the hypocrisies and vanities of nations and individuals, the lies we tell ourselves and others, the organisational chaos, the swallowing up of the singular person in the war machine. To get at these other truths about wartime, a different register is necessary. Wars are hard to look at head-on. Emily Dickinson’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant” perhaps applies to nothing so much as conflict.



My novel about a group of young people taking a play to Bosnia in 1994, Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals, isn’t really a war novel in that the central characters are not soldiers. They are a group of basically good-hearted folk who find themselves out of their depth to the point of drowning. It’s about the consequences of intervention, for nations and individual lives. I hope it makes the right kinds of jokes about the folly and tragedy of war.



The following are a selection of novels that certainly get it right, that pick away at the big cover story of war and find a way to laugh at what’s underneath:



1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

“I’m asking you to tell us when you didn’t say it,” Clevinger is asked at a military tribunal. But the question regards a comment he never uttered. “I always didn’t say you couldn’t punish me, sir.” Catch-22 is the big daddy of funny war novels. It’s capacious and occasionally rambling. It’s a bible of literate comedy: you can find anything you want inside – it’s all in there. A book so well known its title has broken out into common usage, though it still looks with envy at 1984 and its successful Big Brother and Room 101 franchises.

2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut noted that nothing good had come from the terrible destruction of the allied firebombing of Dresden, which he survived in a meat cellar. It didn’t shorten the war by a day, or free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited: “Me, I got several dollars for each person killed. Imagine.” The firebombing is the central event and concern of the novel, but Vonnegut’s view from early on is that there is really not much to say about a massacre. So the firebombing is something of a black hole at the centre of the book – hardly visible, but swirling the whole crazy circus of alien zoos and time travel around its gravitational pull.

3. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek

Hašek managed to fight for three separate armies during the first world war: the Austro-Hungarian, the Czech and the Russian. That’s likely to provide you with a good deal of ironising distance from events. His Svejk is an enormously likable wise-doofus, who gives us a worm’s eye view of Europe smashing itself to pieces. It opens with news of the assassination of the Archduke. Svejk, hearing only the first name, initially thinks it might be his friend Ferdinand, who makes his living collecting dog shit. The dialogue and comic tone are arrestingly modern.

4. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

An encouraging novel for the non-soldier war writer. Crane was not a veteran of the American civil war he describes; indeed, he was born six years after its end. Still, both the impressionistic sequence of battle scenes in the book and the internal reflections of Henry Fleming, the young man at the novel’s centre, read as highly authentic: “The youth stared. Surely, he thought, this impossible thing was not about to happen. He waited as if he expected the enemy to suddenly stop, apologise, and retire bowing. It was all a mistake.”

5. Red Alert by Peter George

Peter Sellers on the set of Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Photograph: Cat's Collection/Corbis

Red Alert is a gripping cold war bomber-command procedural. But read now, you can see Dr Strangelove – the film which took the book as source material – peeping through the gaps. George was an ex-RAF pilot and CND member who disliked Stanley Kubrick’s take on his book. However, after the success of Strangelove he ended up writing a novelisation of the film his own book had generated. A cruel and unusual punishment.

6. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Not a laugh riot, you may think. And largely, you are correct. But this is Nikolai going into battle at Schöngrabern, facing the French army: “Who are they? Why are they running? They’re not after me. They can’t be after me! Why? They can’t want to kill me! Me. Everybody loves me!” Funny, no? In among everything else he manages to do, Tolstoy takes time to pick away at the mess, confusion and detail of conflict and put you inside the heads of young men trying to live up to their ideals of heroism and duty.

7. Nineteen-Eighty Four by George Orwell

Sometimes Orwell can read as if he thinks comedy is something slightly suspect Auden might try on him late at night. But Anthony Burgess called this a comic novel. Another non-laugh riot – and I suppose it’s not strictly even a war novel – but it’s a novel set against the background of never-ending wars. And it is surely a work of satire. Even the famous opening line about the clocks striking 13 fits Orwell’s own definition of every joke being a “tiny revolution”.

8. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Alec Guinness in the 1959 film of Our Man in Havana. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Columbia

After publication in the early 60s Greene’s novel was seen as having predicted elements of the Cuban missile crisis. But reading it today, the central role of unreliable agents and the preparation of intelligence reports where vacuum cleaner parts are presented as military equipment will amuse anyone who remembers the Iraq war and the intelligence assessments made public before invasion.

9. Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall by Spike Milligan

Is it a novel? Is it a memoir? Milligan says in his preface: “After Puckoon I swore I would never write another novel. This is it.” Brittle then sentimental. Angry then elegiac. The tone is highly Spikey, even uneven, but if there are books that take you closer to the everyday texture of life among the mass of men in the British army in the second world war than this and the rest of Milligan’s seven-part “trilogy”, I don’t know what they are.

10. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

James’s novel is set against the background of two wars that weren’t quite wars – the cold war and Jamaica’s political-drug-gang wars of the 70s and 80s. Through a variety of first-person narratives it fictionalises the lives of the men who tried to murder Bob Marley before the 1976 Smile Jamaica peace concert. No laugh rioting here, for sure; the world is violent and claustrophobic, but the dry observations and snakey evasions of the voices that stake out the story are like sparklers dancing in the dark.



Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £12.99. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop for £9.99





