the rack

The Rack by A. E. Ellis [Derek Lindsay] (Penguin, 1979)

The Rack, originally published in 1958, chronicles the two years Paul Davanet, a young Englishman (27), spends at a TB sanatorium in the French Alps shortly after the end of the WWII.

Paul arrives at the sanatorium with a group of international students all suffering from TB; they are sponsored by an international organization and are sequestered from the private patients (although midway through the novel Paul receives a legacy that allows him to become a private patient). Since life at the sanatorium involves little more than periods of rest alternated with various grueling and painful (and usually ineffectual) treatments, not much happens in the book. Paul does meet and fall in love with a vivacious young (17) Belgian girl who is also suffering from TB. Her treatment is more successful than Paul’s and she returns home to Belgium, leaving Paul to what appears to be a never-ending sequence of brutal and debilitating treatments that stretch forever into his future. He attempts to kills himself by overdosing on tranquilizers he has secretly hoarded but is rescued before the drugs can have their fatal effect.

The Rack is chiefly a book about different characters: the patients and doctors surrounding Paul and the small and claustrophobic world they inhabit. These portraits are all vivid and engaging, and the descriptions of a relentlessly and monotonously institutional life are powerfully written. A sad, upsetting book about the spiritually debilitating effects of living a half-life.