The Rack

This was the pseudonym of Derek Lindsay, who died last year (Andrew Sinclair: Derek Lindsay, London Magazine May/June 2001). 'Saturnine and reclusive', he was a friend of Kenneth Tynan and is mentioned in Kathleen Tynan's biography of her husband. Another friend was Cyril Connolly, and Ellis wrote a memoir for the Adam International Review memorial for Connolly. The only other work I have heard of is a play, Grand Manouevres, produced at he National Theatre, but not published as far as I can tell, and translations of film scripts for Lorimer Books in the 1960s. Sincalir is editing Ellis's unfinished/abandoned novel. There is also more on Ellis in Sinclair's memoir In Love and Anger.

I read this novel twenty years ago sitting up all night by a wood stove in South Wales. I was about twenty five and recently married. I found it heartbreaking. The love affair Paul has with Michele moved me immeasurably, with the final pages finishing me off. Tearful throughout, I broke down, sobbing. Why this book is so often out of print I will never know. Nor can I understand why no film has been made of it. AE Ellis is not the author's real name, and apparently wrote nothing else. I advise anyone who can get hold of a copy of The Rack to read it and then pass it on to a friend. I did. The friend never returned it; but I recently came across a first edition in a second hand bookstall for 50 pence. I don't think I'll ever read it again, though. It would be pointless. This book still affects me more than anything I've read since.

This is a deftly-written, incisive, constantly-interesting novel of a young Englishman's never-ending treatment for tuberculosis in the French Alps. The author, writing perhaps from personal experience, convincingly depicts the medical (mis)treatment suffered by the protagonist, who is given an incredible run-around by ludicrous doctors who diagnose his condition as alternately hopeful then not. The protagonist's one chance for real happiness, an affair with a fellow (female) patient, does not endure, unlike his illness. The novel's finale finds him facing a seemingly perpetual future among the sanitoria in the mountains. Graham Greene praised this novel when it appeared. There was talk of it being filmed. Apart from a short story I once chanced upon, A.E. Ellis appears to have done little beside "The Rack". Yet it is quite enough, really.