This wasn’t the kind of thing I would normally go for, but I loved it. It was written with so much compassion and kindness, I felt I knew the characters – flaws and all – like my own family.

I have no idea why I requested this book, but I'm glad I did. It is hard to believe the mumbo-jumbo medicine that was practised only 80 years ago in treating TB patients (although I suspect in 80 years time we will look back at some of the responses to Covid in a similar way).
Not what you'd call an enjoyable read, but very well done..

Drawing on his own experiences within sanatoriums, Ellis delivers us a macabre and unsettling account of tuberculosis treatment in the years following WWII.

The book was agonising for me in a variety of ways. Our protagonist suffers a multitude of treatments which made my teeth clench - the experimental nature of which was enough to make me feel sick. There’s little to no hope, the feeling of isolation ripped through the pages until it instilled claustrophobia, the density of the text, the sheer length of the thing, everything contributed to me feeling as Paul would’ve felt - trapped, helpless, and desperate to escape.

Although I feel this is an important account of the treatment of tuberculosis after the war, this story is something to enter into with hesitant resolve - so very bleak, and seemingly unending, it will hold your mind in its hands for quite some time afterwards.

I'm not sure I'd consider this book a masterpiece, but I have enjoyed it, and welcome its republication.

Set in a Swiss sanatorium, the story concentrates on the life of Paul, a student with TB, and details the medical procedures he undergoes in the hope of a cure. (Warning, the medical bits can get fairly descriptive, so avoid if you don't like that sort of thing).

Sometimes normal life seems just around the corner, other times Paul finds himself at death's door. As the months go on, a new patient provides a love interest for Paul, and he starts to dream of the future he could have.

Set in a beautifully described mountain setting, this is an interesting read.

Unfortunately this wasn't a book for me and I gave up 120 pages in. It was very slow, I didn't feel anything for the characters and I couldn't see where the story would go.

I was given a copy of The Rack by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbaised review.

The Rack, the only published novel by playwright Derek Lindsay writing under the name A.E. Ellis, was first published in 1958 to critical acclaim. It has recently been republished in an attempt to restore its status as a classic. It’s not difficult to see why this has happened now, as The Rack captures a brief period in medical history when knowledge about how to treat a condition was evolving quickly. In this case, the condition was TB and the novel is set in the late 1940s.

Protagonist Paul Davenant and some fellow students are sent as a party to a sanitorium in the Alps to be treated for TB. While most of Paul’s contemporaries have straightforward cases and are able to move through the programme of treatment and return to their former lives, for Paul it is just the start of a long, frequently painful process.

Paul is treated by a succession of doctors whose primary aim seems to be the cementing of their own reputations rather than providing empathic patient care, and as well as brutal medical procedures he has to withstand numerous episodes of grandstanding by the medics, each of whom promises to have the solution to his health woes if he will just invest another three months.

There are also various friends who drift in and out of Paul’s life during this period, displaying a range of poor social skills. Paul tolerates everything placidly; at times it is hard to know whether he is a rather passive individual or just a man who has been driven to clinical depression by the endurance test he is on. Things pick up when he meets and falls in love with another patient, Michele, but even this relationship seems to bring Paul as much distress as it does happiness, as they navigate issues including Paul’s dwindling funds and Michele’s need to go back home to Belgium.

The Rack is a lengthy read at over 500 pages and, due to the subject matter, it is not an easy one. I am glad to have read it, as it gives a unique insight into patient care just before the corner was turned and effective TB treatments became available. The descriptions of sanitorium care were fascinating as well, giving many insights into the running of these large institutions that were once commonplace.

I had this book on my wishlist for a long time as it won great critcial acclaim when it was pucblished and Graham Greene compared it to writing by Camus, Mann and Proust. So, I have to say I was quite disappointed. The book isn't bad it is just a well written account of a WWII soldier who returns from the war to restart his studies at Cambridge but develops TB. The Government has a scheme sending groups of students to a sanitorium in the Alps for a cure. and we follow Paul as he reaches a crisis, is subjected to various horrible treatments, gets used to life on the wards and starts to meet the private patients who reside on a lower floor and get served much better food and one of whom gives him a reason to wnat to get better and live again. It was all told nicely and makes for an interesting "historical" read of the treatment protocls for TB in the late 40's. It was okay but didn't blow me away.

This book was both really hard to read and really hard to put down. The experiences that the patients went through in the Sanatorium to help their TB was barbaric and chilling and even more so as you know that it could all of happened and more behind closed doors in the time it was set in.
It was well written with an engaging if not horrific storyline and well developed characters. It was a hard read but one that I am glad that I got to read.

Can a novel be excellent and yet also barely readable? That's perhaps the central question of this classic of medical fiction. For the first fifty pages The Rack provides the reader with some conventional entry points. A motley group of English young men diagnosed with TB arrive at a Swiss sanatorium for treatment in the late forties. There’s an exotic locale, there are quirky secondary characters and a sympathetic protagonist in the shape of ex-Oxford and ex-army student Paul, with a packing crate full of books and a damaged lung.

But as the second act gets into its stride it becomes increasingly focused on Paul’s suffering. The operations go on and on, the doctors change as another new medical course is proposed. Different drugs, different regimes, but the same cycle: treatment, recovery, hope, relapse, despair. One by one Paul’s comrades fall away, their place taken by a teenage girl Michele whose relationship with the quintessentially diffident and reserved Paul dominates the last third of the book.

The insight and focus this book has into the suffering of chronic disease one can only marvel at, and one which is clearly borne of personal experience. It might be glib to say that it’s gruelling experience for the reader, but that;s clearly what the writer intended.

First published in 1958, this is the story of TB sufferer Paul Davenant and his treatment in a Swiss sanatorium.

The experimental treatment wouldn’t be out of place in a torture chamber, with the medical staff its sadists.

The inclusion of interstitial details, not something encountered (nor tolerated) in these days of rapid-access social media, gives the reading experience all the monotony and boredom of what life must have been like in a sanatorium.

Horrifying, yet hard to resist.

We meet Paul Davenant in the interwar years of the early twentieth century, as he and some fellow university arrive at a TB sanatorium in the Alps. Having never undergone treatment at a sanatorium before, Paul’s new friends as well as his doctors take great delight in informing him of the varied and gruesome “treatments” that might await him, should his illness progress. What follows is the story of his stay, his treatments, and his interactions with his doctors and fellow patients, including the woman with whom he falls in love.

This is a brutal, beautiful book, and I loved it. The descriptions of the treatments were so incredibly graphic that I could barely look at the page, and yet the relationships that develop are described with such intimacy and humanity that I couldn’t put it down. The story speaks so much about the human capacity for pain, hope, and friendship, and was, unexpectedly, darkly comic throughout. This truly deserves its status as a classic, and is one that will stay with me for some time.

My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the arc to review.

This ‘rediscovered masterpiece’ has perhaps been published as a timely reminder that, if we didn’t know this already, we should all thank our lucky stars every minute of every day for advances in medical science and equal access to treatment on the NHS, whether we are rich or poor.
This is the story of a poor Cambridge student, Paul Davenant, who, supported by barely adequate funds from a student organisation, is admitted to a Swiss sanatorium, where patients are segregated according to income. Paul receives inedible food and is treated as a guinea pig by a succession of grotesquely indifferent, bombastic, megalomaniac doctors, some of whom appear to enjoy inflicting on Paul barbaric, experimental medical interventions. One announces with great glee: ‘Monsieur, we have just learned that your bacilli are far wickeder than we had anticipated’. Another tells Paul to consider himself ‘an experiment of the gods in what a man can endure’.
The novel is written in a detached manner, reminiscent of Kafka (who also suffered from TB) in its matter-of-fact narration which describes in minute and precise detail the sheer horror of Paul’s treatments, as a series of large needles puncture his lungs and liquids such as creosote are poured into his lung cavities.
It is a gruelling read as Paul oscillates between optimism and despair, initially trusting the doctors, but gradually losing faith in them as they promise him constantly that he will be cured in three months. Years slowly creep by and despair sets in as Paul gradually fears that he will never regain his health.
It isn’t all despair. There are some very funny passages as Paul describes the eccentric cast of characters who share his confinement, and there are touching passages as Paul describes his desperate love affair with a fellow patient.
Not just a novel then, this book is an invaluable historical record, documenting the history of medical treatments for TB before the advent of effective antibiotics. It’s also an invaluable social document with its insight into the inequalities of medical care. And it provides a fascinating picture of life in a sanatorium in the 1950s.
Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest review.

I had to stop reading this book halfway through. The story of Paul Davenant, a tuberculosis patient in an Alpine sanatorium, makes for very difficult reading, especially the painful treatments he undergoes which are described in minute detail and based on the author's own experience.

My mother contracted tuberculosis in the 1930s, spent a long time in a sanatorium and thankfully recovered to live to a long and happy life. She didn't tell me much about it, although the medical vocabulary in this book was instantly familiar, but any mention of the name of the place where she was treated (now famous for heart surgery) upset her, so it must have been a very traumatic experience. One aspect that she did talk about was the camaraderie among the patients - she made good friends there and there were lots of jolly pranks - so that part of the book resonated for me.

This book emphasises that we have much to be thankful for in the development of medical science which has provided drug treatments for this disease, which carried not only physical threats for patients but also social stigmatization arising from fear of infection. But it is a very hard read. Netgalley provided me with an ARC.I

A group of former soldiers arrive in a sanitarium in France as they have severe tuberculosis. They are the less important group as they are not private patients and this is demonstrated by the poor food they are given and other aspects of poor care. The book is about one patient in particular, Paul. It traces his medical experience and his personal response to his condition. There is extensive, detailed medical information. The book is well written if depressing. It’s place is more as a historical record of the effects of tuberculosis than an interesting read. I found it to be a difficult, tiresome read.

This is a timely reprint given the fuss over vaccinations and the Covid viruses. It is about tuberculosis and an almost forgotten history of the efforts to isolate and treat the disease before antibiotics became available.

The central character is Paul Davenant, a Cambridge undergraduate who has contracted TB in military service and is sent to a sanatorium in France to breathe mountain air and, hopefully, to recover. In the 1930s and 1940s, sanatoria appeared to offer the best hope for treating TB through complete rest for patients, fresh air and the occasional medical intervention and many people would have a rosy picture of their peace and quiet but, in reality, it clearly wasn’t quite like that. Since AE Ellis is a pseudonym for Derek Lindsay, who also spent time in the military and at Cambridge before being confined in a French sanatorium with TB, the intention of this novel is to describe the reality of what went on.

As it is described by Paul, the sanatorium daily life could vary according to what the patient could afford while the treatments proposed could vary in the level of inhumanity they imposed. Medical science was willing to try almost anything in the fight against TB, even to the extent of removing the ribs of patients or pouring creosote into their lung cavities. This makes the sufferings of Paul Davenant almost too horrific to read at times but even that understates the mental suffering which went beyond the physical disease. This book is a very grim read indeed.

There cannot be any doubt that what we are reading is both autobiographical and an authentic account of a long-term stay in a French sanatorium. A range of other characters, mostly male, young and also suffering from TB, are introduced and the changes the disease brings about in them are also shocking. Finally, some of the doctors working in these sanatoria also had TB, usually in some form of remission, but still as deadly eventually.

It is a dispassionate, bitter yet convincing account of how TB and isolation wrecked people’s lives. As if to underline this, Paul’s attempts to develop a genuine loving relationship are thwarted at every turn and, eventually, are doomed. Many people die. There’s no happy ending.

It’s not at all an easy read but perhaps it should be compulsory for people opposed to vaccinations and the good they do for public health. In some ways this is a timely reprint and a reminder of how bad things could be without them.

When The Rack was first published in 1958 it was hailed as a literary masterpiece destined to take its place among the great novels of its age, and yet its author, Derek Lindsay never wrote another book, and today it’s a little known novel. So did it deserve such lavish praise? In a word, yes.
The novel is so immersive, telling its story with such a painful, brutal intensity and accuracy that it leaves you longing to escape the endless cycle of hope and despair, yet clinging, like the protagonist, to any chance of release.
The Rack tells the story of Paul Davenant, an unremarkable young man stricken with TB, who has arrived at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps with high hopes of a full cure and a normal life. As the weeks and months pass interminably by, Davenant undergoes endless tests and torturous medical procedures, all the while facing the possibility that his case may be hopeless. Despite the pain, indignity, and tediousness of these brutal procedures before effective antibiotic treatments were available, Davenant never loses sight of the outrageous, absurd and farcical side to his situation. He never gives up.
I was not surprised to discover that the author bears many similarities to the hero of his book. Derek Lindsay who wrote using the pseudonym A E Ellis was born in 1920. He was orphaned at 3 and brought up by an aunt. After serving in the Second World War, he returned to England and attended Oxford University. When he became ill with tuberculosis, Lindsay was sent to a sanatorium in the Alps, where the years of his slow cure provided the inspiration for his first and only novel, The Rack. Happily, however, Derek went on to live a long life and died in 2000.
It may be coincidental, but it feels like a timely re-release of the book because reading this in 2022, it’s hard not to see some similarities to the ups and downs, the fear and dark humour, the hope and despair, of Covid and its effect on the nation’s morale and mental health. One moment thinking we’re through the worst, only to be repeatedly hit with new variants and restrictions on our lives. A roller coaster of emotions which has really taken its toll.
This book is a powerful read. It can feel like heavy going in parts, thanks to the almost unbearably painful and detailed descriptions of Paul’s barbaric treatment, the repetition, and the bizarre editorial decision to include large sections of narrative in French without providing any translation. (Unless that’s just the ARC?) But, overall, these criticisms are minor, and the story of man’s capacity for love and hope against all the odds, sticks with you despite the bleakness of the tale.
With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Paul Davenant, a patient in a Alpine sanitorium, is gleefully told he's to be tortured by the treatment for his tuberculosis, and when he duly is, his doctors express little sympathy. Their bedside manner is severely lacking and Davenant must put up with the rigours of treatment as well as the medical men's insensitivity. The Rack reads like a black comedy at times; indeed the three doctors are like a music hall act.

The sisters who nurse him are no better - indeed all the women (apart from one or two exceptions) are presented as idiotic or incompetent. But then, so are the men.

The various other TB patients we meet - mostly young male students - rail against their enforced confinement with pranks and high jinks. They stage protests against the abominable food, get drunk, dress up, push each other about on trolleys, and generally carry on as if they are at a rag day parade. Paul, less well than they, suffers mostly silently and grows depressed.

When he falls in love the tone changes. Paul now has something to live for but not the means to pursue it. His time in the sanitorium is ever expanding - another three months, by Christmas you'll be well enough to leave, by Easter, by summer, another three months; and so it goes on. His beloved, Michele, very young and rather irritating, is willing to wait for him. But how long can she put her life on hold? We cannot help falling into despair along with Paul at his lack of prospects, lack of money, and lack of health.

There are some beautiful descriptive passages, use of wonderful words and medical terminology, lots of untranslated French, and over it all a feverish, hallucinatory account of the indignities and privations of TB treatment in the fifties. This is a long book, at times repetitive, and with characters who are often barely believable. However, it is an astonishing account, and one to be savoured and reflected upon.

Fluency in French implied : Post 2WW TB sanatorium set saga. 3.5 rating

Comparison’s to Mann’s 1924 Magic Mountain inevitably arise – both are (very) long novels, set in the closed society of a sanitorium, but whereas Mann’s novel in many ways explores the wider world, as politics and ideology come under his microscope, Ellis’s novel focuses far more on medical matters, with graphic details of barbaric treatments for a disease which had not, at the time of writing, become managed.

I assume that the republication of this novel has come about because the world has been in the grip of another lethal respiratory condition, albeit one where modern medicine has found a remarkably quick way to subdue or partially subdue

The author of The Rack, who only wrote one novel, which was highly praised at the time of its 1958 publication, was also a playwright, and pertinently, spent some years himself in a sanitorium in the French Alps, and had experienced some of the ‘heroic’ treatments which were in place, and painstakingly described – pneumothorax, rib removal, injecting noxious substances such as iodine and creosote into the lungs.

By the time of the book’s publication, TB was being successfully managed by medical rather than surgical means, with combination drugs.

The Rack follows the story – in a manner which is both darkly horrific (those treatment details) and, at times, mordantly funny – of Paul Davenant. It is very much the story of an individual,. rather than one which stands for something much wider. Davenant, a somewhat impecunious Cambridge undergraduate, comes to the Swiss Alpine hospital as a protegee of the International Students’ Organisation.

Though to some extent the novel could have explored the difference between those with more means being treated in the ‘private patient’ wing, as opposed to the cohort of international students, this is not really particularly engaged with – the treatments were similar, but the surrounds (food, accommodation) differed.

Davenant, sensitive and diffident, falls in love with another patient, ‘a private’ and this is as much an obviously doomed love story as well as a story of the war between a disease and its host.

Something which frustrated was the constant insertion of words, dialogue in French. Sure, the setting was in French speaking Switzerland, and sure, a modern reader who is not fluent in the language has easy recourse to translation (especially reading on an ereader, assuming Wifi can be enabled, but back in the day this would have prevented enjoyment for anyone without immediate access to a French/English dictionary or a fairly well developed knowledge of the language.

There are no footnotes within the digital text, either.

So, for me and my only schoolgirl French, I found I was either repeatedly taken out of the story in order to get a line of dialogue translated, or, just had to skate over without full comprehension in order to stay connected with the journey.

I also felt the book was longer than it needed to be, as there was a lot of repetition (particularly wearing in interchanges with some of the ‘comic relief’ characters) which did not advance either the narrative, or a deeper understanding of the characters themselves, and their relationships to each other.

I ended up somewhat surprised and bemused by the plaudits the book received from the great and the good, at the time of publication

I was grateful to be offered this as a digital Arc, pleased to have read it, even if not blown away. A worthy book, sure, but not one which deeply invaded my being

Resonated with me as a family member was in a sanatorium with TB in the 1950s. Wasn't sure quite what to expect but it drew me right in. Some dark humour and a lot of insight into the patient's experience of TB, the treatments on offer post war, the sanatorium routine, class difference coupled with a plethora of engaging and also unsavoury characters. Will be one to treasure and re-read periodically.

Unfortunately I didn't get too far. A lot of French and none of it is translated. I wouldn't mind if translations were in the footer, but I don't have the time to try and find out what it means as I'm reading. It's not the never itself, but more the way it is edited that made it unreadable for me.

It's a shame as I was really looking forward to it