This Long Disease, My Life

The Rack by A. E. Ellis. Atlantic, Little, Brown. $4.50.

This is a brilliant first novel by an Englishman who writes under the pseudonym of A. E. Ellis: it is the despairing, nauseating history of the long sickness of a tubercular English student. The Rack has been enthusiastically received—as it should be—both in England and America, though it is equally remote from current English and American novels: it is closer in outlook to existential writing, and like many existential novels—say Camus’ L’Etranger or Sartre’s La Nausée—The Rack tries to be both a novel of ideas, which states explicitly that the hero’s experience stands for the human condition, and a novel of feeling, which makes its statement implicitly by evoking an extended mood of anguish or absurdity. Sometimes Mr. Ellis states his ideas explicitly, but he does not let them control his book, and perhaps The Rack is a more exciting piece of writing for insisting upon its moody story per se, and for presenting characters who exist only for their value within the novel, not as mouthpieces. Fortunately, it is impossible to talk about the hero, Paul Davenant, in the philosophical, extra-literary way that is appropriate to the characters of Camus and Sartre. On the other hand since Mr. Ellis refuses to allow his characters and plot merely to state ideas—even the idea that the world is irrational and meaningless—his novel, as intense as it is, would appear to come down to an almost old-fashioned realism.