It had a big impact on me as a 15 year old. You realise that there's no way to escape the cumulative effect of the whole lot, it's been built up in all the books, and then it comes to get him, completely and uncontrollably. You're so absorbed in the banal, hilarious but also horrific world of Milligan's war, you're almost comfortable with it, and he's sort of distanced from everything awful that happens around him, or a least able to look for the absurd in it, and find pleasure where he can (music, collegiality, japes, the endless search for women to sleep with), that when he is finally and unexpectedly taken by an extreme breakdown it shocks and moves. Anyway - I loved the whole 'trilogy', but this is the one that packs the real punch. I really find him a comic genius, if such a thing can be said of anyone, not necessarily because he's funnier than anyone else (that sorta depends on context, I reckon) but because his vision of the world is so different to everyone else's. I read this many years ago, as a teenager, the whole series of Milligan's war memoirs in fast succession, actually.
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