When “The Rack” was first published in 1958, it was called a masterpiece by such contemporary luminaries as Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett. And they weren’t far wrong - this has to be one of the finest novels ever written about illness and its treatment.
There is an obvious comparison to be made with Thomas Mann's celebrated "The Magic Mountain" - both recount a naive young man's experience in an Alpine sanitarium for tuberculosis - but the similarities are superficial. Whereas Mann's work is a spacious novel of ideas, "The Rack" is a tale of intense, almost claustrophobic realism and existential dread. Both novels have a cool, lightly ironic narrative voice, but whereas the German writer's tone is lofty, that of Ellis is clinically precise as it charts the hero Paul Davenant's psychological and physical responses, from euphoric hope to hallucinatory despair, to the pitiless ministrations of a seemingly learned but increasingly macabre team of French physicians. What keeps the reader going is the inescapable fascination of what the doctors will do next to arrest Paul's badly damaged lungs and whether or not they will one day freely or simply collapse under the onslaught of one hideous medical intervention after another.
Paul is an innocent Everyman - a World War II veteran, now a student at Cambridge, an orphan with no family ties, a young man whose prospects are utterly blotted out by his unpredictable, all-consuming illness (the outmoded name for tuberculosis - consumption - has never seemed so apt). His spirit soars when he falls in love with a fellow patient, a beautiful young Belgian girl, but rarely have two lovers found themselves in such star-crossed circumstances, gripped as they are by the implacable will of their illness and the bureaucratic vice of the sanitarium.
For all its realism, "The Rack" has the surreal force of a nightmare by Kafka - “Carry On Nurse” directed by Quentin Tarantino - and won’t be to everyone’s taste as it is more endurance test than novel. Even so, it sustains a sense of black comedy that keeps the most painful scenes from becoming unbearable. This is a beautifully told, meticulously observed story of the human spirit undergoing a most severe trial. An intimate epic.