Simon Mawer: five best war novels There are so many war novels to choose from. Obvious ones spring to mind - you can easily draw up your own list - and many will be grim and bloody and serious. Yet war is a complex business, and although it may include blood and guts and all those things we would rather do without, there is still humour to be found. Sometimes it's acrid and bitter, as in Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, first published in 1929 in bowdlerised form, which treats wartime society with startling modernist acidity; sometimes it's outrageous and eye-wateringly funny, as with Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (1955-1961); sometimes it's absurd and satirical like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), which says as much about the Vietnam War as it does about the Second World War in which it is set. Another from the American experience is Slaughterhouse Five (1969), in which Kurt Vonnegut employed the surreal techniques of science fiction to deal, in part, with his own experience of being in Dresden during the raid and firestorm of February 1945. Every one of these writers experienced war at first hand and, amid the misery of death and destruction, each managed to find humour of a kind. The tradition continues among living writers: The Things They Carried (1990) is a remarkable collection of intertwined narratives in which Tim O'Brien explores the boundaries between truth and fiction while telling stories drawn directly from his own experience in Vietnam. So it goes.