The Constant Gardener: John Le Carré

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Justin convinces the pilot to mail Pellegrin's letter to Ham, and to drop him off at Lake Turkana. Removing the bullets from his gun, his final thoughts are of Tessa before he is killed by KDH's henchmen. In London at Tessa and Justin's memorial service, Pellegrin lies that Justin committed suicide in the same place his wife died. Ham announces the reading of an epistle, but instead reads Pellegrin's letter, exposing the deaths caused by Dypraxa and the subsequent coverup. Pellegrin storms out as Ham implicates the British government, KDH, and public complacency regarding the human cost of medicine they take for granted.

Tessa Quayle was a diplomat’s wife on a social justice mission, who struggled to be taken seriously by the proper authorities. She was a slight annoyance to her husband’s colleagues at the High Commission in Nairobi… until she is found, murdered by Lake Turkana, her driver decapitated and her confidant (and supposed lover) missing. Justin Quayle might have seemed like a placid man and a bit of a cold fish, but he is anything but: he will stop at nothing to find out who killed his wife and why, and in the process, will uncover a far-reaching conspiracy that he could not have even imagined.

Mildren had a permanent pout. Seated at his desk he looked like a naughty fat boy who has refused to finish up his porridge.

le Carré exposes these exploitative crimes by means of a love story set within the British embassy community in Nairobi. Tessa is the decades-younger wife of Justin Quayle, a career diplomat who has studiously created a pleasant but somewhat uninvolved life where his greatest passion is cultivating plants, not relationships. That changes once they meet, and the momentum of the book stems from Justin's attempts at becoming reconciled to his failure to commit fully to his love for Tessa, and to her zeal for confronting injustice. We’re fine.” A delay, of Woodrow’s manufacture. “And Tessa is up-country,” he suggested. He was giving her one last chance to prove it was all a dreadful mistake. Since he killed off Smiley, Le Carré's fiction has been an attempt to generalise and diffuse his marvellous creation through various voices and faces, to accomplish, in other words, the traditional task of the novelist. His new novel gives us, unambiguously, the impression that its creator has suffered all the wrongs of man. It may use the form of the thriller but its moral and artistic concerns go well beyond the task of entertainment.

Le Carré is amazing. He doesn't fall into the easy path. Yes, Big Pharma is bad, but not in some monolithic/caricatured way. It doesn't just do evil, but does many things that are good. This is le Carré's style. There is infinite shading that he does with EVERYTHING. Each character is shaded, and mirrors each other character. Some characters are flipped, some are mirrored, some are distortions, but each character is complicated, nuanced and difficult to view from one position. Le Carré writes with an artistry that makes it impossible to not love the good, despite their faults, and still appreciate the human-like frailties of the bad. Well, I don’t think it can really—no, it can’t,” Mildren replied, gathering conviction as he spoke. “It’s Tessa Quayle, Sandy.” Woodrow had a moment of mental numbness and when he woke from it he heard Wolfgang saying yes, he had met Bluhm once before. So Woodrow must have asked him the question, although he hadn’t heard it himself. Issue one: the side effects are being deliberately concealed in the interest of profit. Issue two: the world's poorest communities are used as guinea pigs by the world's richest. Issue three: legitimate scientific debate of these issues is stifled by corporate intimidation.”

This was my first exposure to John Le Carré, and I guess I was expecting a thriller. What I got wasn’t quite fitting the bill as I imagined it. Which is a good thing, I come to think. And yet my brain kept trying to fit it into a category. Thriller? Not in the conventional sense. Suspense? Not so much. Murder mystery? Nah, there’s a murder but not much mystery. Exposé? Perhaps but not quite. For a moment of paralysis Woodrow had no further questions, or perhaps he had too many. I’m in prison already, he thought. My life sentence started five minutes ago. He passed a hand across his eyes and when he removed it he saw Donohue and Sheila watching him with the same blank expressions they had worn when he told them she was dead.

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Justin is our “constant gardener” : a man who "loves nothing better than toiling in the flowerbeds on a Saturday afternoon - a gentleman , whatever that means - the right sort of Etonian, courteous to a fault ...". Returning to London, Justin's passport is confiscated. He dines with Pellegrin, who lies that Arnold must have murdered Tessa, and believes that Justin has his incriminating letter. Justin meets with Tessa's cousin and lawyer Ham, and they access her computer files to reveal her investigation into Dypraxa and its manufacturer, pharmaceutical conglomerate KDH, who hired Three Bees to test the drug on unsuspecting Kenyans. The book ends, and then ends again, in a brilliantly-written coda that is truly arresting in its skill. Oh you that have love in your life, read this book and remain unaffected. I dare you. Use your imagination, Mr. Chancery. You know what happens to corpses in this heat? You want to fly her down to Nairobi, you better cut her up or she won’t get into the hold.”