Feed: Culture | The Guardian
Posted on: Monday, March 21, 2022 12:00 PM
Author: Alex Preston
Subject: The Rack by AE Ellis review – a masterly map of suffering
| Playwright Derek Lindsay's only novel under his nom de plume is a stark, hallucinogenic trip into a barbaric postwar TB hospital The sanatorium makes for a wonderful crucible: an enclosed space inside which the events of a novel can play out. Thomas Mann used the heightened sensibilities of a group of confined tuberculosis patients in his 1924 masterpiece, The Magic Mountain. In it, our hero, Hans Castorp, goes to visit a consumptive cousin at a sanatorium in Davos. He ends up staying for seven years, engaging in metaphysical jousting with a host of other residents – each of whom represents a different approach to the great philosophical questions of the age – and falling in love with the alluring Clawdia Chauchat. The novel ends with Castorp going off to fight (and, we presume, die) in the first world war. AE Ellis was the pen name of the playwright Derek Lindsay, an enigmatic figure who produced one great, celebrated novel, The Rack, in 1958 and then, aside from a couple of largely forgotten plays, disappeared from view. The Rack was described by Graham Greene as rising like a "monument above the cemeteries of literature". It is a novel in complex dialogue with Mann's The Magic Mountain, and, to my mind at least, equally masterful. I reread The Rack with the weight of my second bout of Covid still heavy on my chest: there is now an extraordinary and dreadful resonance in a book that charts, perhaps better than anything else I've read, the tortuous paths of illness. |