The titles in the "Textplus" series, designed to reflect the changing nature of English Literature at advanced post-GCSE level, offer the complete text with a specially commissioned introduction and compact background notes placing the work in historical and critical context. Together, these components are intended to open up the text for students, allowing them to plot their own course of study, to plan extended projects, to compare writers' perspectives on similar themes and to relate works to key social and historical phenomena.
It grew on me. It took quite a while (basically until the last few chapters) for me to appreciate the book, with all its endless jokes but it comes together in the end. For a while I was reading it piecemeal but when I finally dug in and read quite a bit at a time it really picked up. In many ways this feels similar in town to another anti-war book I read, Slaughterhouse V. Although I feel like a lot of the "gags" are overdone the book really leaves a strong impression of the author's disillusionment and contempt for the military and war. Goes from very dark to very light very quickly.
