don't forget the rack

I’m not aware that Ellis wrote anything other than this 1958 novel, which naturally reminded me of that other book dealing with a tubercular young man seeking treatment in the Alps, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Since reading that book more than twenty years ago, I’ve probably become less idealistic, less hungry for knowledge, and certainly more bronchitic, though Ellis’ depiction makes my phlegmy gobbets feel quite benign.  
Unlike Mann’s largely relaxed depiction of dilettantism, The Rack is much more about speculums than speculation (sorry, I had to get that line in), and is harrowing in its unrelenting realism about, not only this particular illness, but the often fatal conjunctions of character, constitution and treatment, not to mention the psychological foibles of examining physicians.
Interestingly, the writer I was most reminded of was Dostoyevski. The intensity of much of Dostoyevski’s writings, and of his on-the-brink characters, has often been attributed to illness – specifically epilepsy. In The Rack we find a similar feverish energy, the energy of youthful fervour trapped in an exhausted and debilitated body. Add to this the brain stimulus of morphine and other drugs of treatment, and you have the formula for the sort of impotent anarchy that marks the novel. We meet an array of irrational characters – nursing staff and doctors as well as fellow-convalescents – and we observe the central character – Paul Davenant, an English student - being subjected to a most bewildering array of contradictory diagnoses and treatments, yet Ellis manages to handle the twists and turns in Davenant’s health and hopes with wry humour. Not surprisingly, the question of suicide, dealt with so heavily and intellectually by Camus a generation earlier, is often foregrounded here, in a very different way. In the end, though, Davenant keeps on keeping on, in spite of the apparent loss of the love of his life  - the unkindest cut of all, though treated with Stendhalian understatement.  
The lines at the end of the book will stay with me, and are worth quoting in full:

Why did he feel such an intensification of grief? ‘Nothing is altered’, he repeated, half aloud. He covered his eyes with his hand. ‘Stretch me no more on this rough world.’ The phrase came irresistibly to his mind. Where had he read it? He picked up Haydon’s Journal and turned to the entry which the latter had made just before killing himself:

‘22nd. God forgive me. Amen.
Finis of
B. R. Haydon
“Stretch me no more on this rough world” – Lear

Something was grotesquely wrong. He opened his Shakespeare.

     “…O, let him pass! He hates him
       That would upon the rack of this tough world
       Stretch him out longer.’

‘The rack’, he murmured. ‘Haydon forgot the rack.’ And his mind still exercised by the strangeness of the omission, he stared across at the half-open window.