Books: Tragic Mountain

THE RACK (414 pp.)—A. E. Ellis—Atlantic-Little, Brown ($4.50).

On the face of it, this is a hospital novel that makes the most of medical melodrama. But it is as far removed from the usual scalpel-and-suture bestseller as a book on home remedies is from Gray’s Anatomy, and it won the choicest collection of British reviews achieved by any book in 1958. Said the Times Literary Supplement: “The book exercises a complete fascination.” Said the Irish Times: “Quite possibly a masterpiece.” Despite the sometimes awesome gulf that separates British and U.S. tastes, U.S. readers are likely to find themselves agreeing with these judgments of The Rack.

Macabre Landscape. To Brisset in the French Alps, where sanatoria dot the landscape like shacks in a gold-rush town, come tuberculosis patients from all over the world. How many fail to return is suggested by the popular nickname of the place: “the cemetery of Europe.” In this macabre mountain spot appears the novel’s hero: Paul Davenant, a British World War II veteran, lately a Cambridge student, now sick and broke. He is a charity case who, with many others, is supported by an international student association at a sanatorium called Les Alpes. Davenant hopes, as do all the patients, that Les Alpes is only an interlude, a place where bracing air, good food, and the wonders of modern medicine will bring back a normal life and freedom from the threat of relapse. Many of the patients are graduates of other sanatoria, and their hopes are tempered by former failures. To a newcomer like Davenant, the experience is a trial that maltreats his body and corrodes his spirit.

Author Ellis’ descriptions of the medical treatments are themselves enough to turn all but the most indifferent stomachs. In writing so exact that the reader constantly wants to cry halt, Author Ellis mounts a picture of torture—Davenant’s bloody sputum, his overpowering fatigue, his successive operations. With a callousness that is often the byproduct of continuously observed suffering, doctors compete for reputation and experiment with various treatments, while the confused patient gains hope, loses it, and finally subsides in confusion. Awkward nurses blunder, the food drives patients to mutiny; in the background lurks the cut-price competition among sanatoria entrepreneurs, who often measure their profit margins by the pennies they save in the kitchen. Seen as an expose of the tuberculosis racket, The Rack would be notable as a muckraking novel alone.

Surpassing Courage. In this setting, Paul Davenant’s will to die often seems stronger than his will to live, and more than once, suicide seems preferable to treatment. What makes life tolerable is his love affair with a girl patient, whose courage surpasses his; her simple presence makes it seem necessary to outwit and outfight the disease. For the first time in his life, he knows love, but he knows it only because it is framed in suffering.

The Rack only superficially invites comparison with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, whose scene was a Swiss sanatorium. Mann used tuberculosis as a backdrop for intellectual swordplay, the sanatorium as a vantage point from which to observe a world in change. Author Ellis concentrates only on the human dilemma posed by life in death. This book cannot approach Mann’s in distinction, but some readers may find it as hard to exorcise Paul Davenant from the mind as it is to forget Mountain’s Hans Castorp.