The Constant Gardener: John Le Carré

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Not known. The police wanted the Oasis to take charge of them but Wolfgang refused. He said his staff would walk out and so would his guests.” A hesitation. “She booked in as Tessa Abbott.” 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. If the extent of the corruption in this novel sound bad le Carre lets us know in the Afterward that his novel lets his readers off easy with the details he shares:

Justin Quayle, a British diplomat and avid horticulturalist, is confronted by Amnesty International activist Tessa during a lecture in London. They strike up a romance, and marry after she accompanies him to his posting in Kenya, where she befriends Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, leading to rumors of an affair. Tessa has no qualms confronting corruption, to the chagrin of Justin's superiors, and they lose a child late in her pregnancy.By contrast, the cold war thrillers were haunted by a sense of whether the things that Smiley (and others) did in pursuit of their cause justified the outcomes. There is no question that this is a very different story and perhaps that equivocal quality would be inappropriate, but I will confess to becoming a bit discouraged with the unrelenting rightness of Tessa's/Justin's cause. 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. One of them is Justin himself, who talks to the ghost of his wife and summons her from memory while on his deceitful journey. It reveals the relationship they had, her secrecy, his adoration, their ordinary, but now tender moments.

And a chum of Tessa’s, obviously.” Ghita’s dark eyes made no comment. “Do you know other people at Bluhm’s outfit?” She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed.” It becomes apparent that British officials investigating Tessa’s death are working in cooperation with ThreeBees. Tessa and Bluhm have been killed by hired gunmen at the instruction of ThreeBees because of their ongoing investigation which would have outed the pharmaceutical company as being irresponsible and unethical. Sounds like the plot of a novel? It was. The book is called "The Constant Gardener." A movie of the same name followed in 2005.Note: The Constant Gardener was written in 2001, well before so much of the US was victimized by the opioid crisis unleashed by real world Big Pharma. The setting was different, but the greed and the human costs were uncannily similar, and the comparison was continuously on the edges of my mind as I read. The fragmented style is the best way to tell this story, both for the novel and the movie. "The Constant Gardener" is not a logical exercise beginning with mystery and ending at truth, but a circling around an elusive conspiracy. Understand who the players are and how they are willing to compromise themselves, and you can glimpse cruel outlines beneath the public relations facade. As the drug companies pour AIDS drugs into Africa, are they using their programs to mask the testing of other drugs? "No drug company does something for nothing," Le Carre has a character observe. There is probably an element of fantasy-fulfillment on Le Carré’s part: the early relationship between Justin and Tessa screams midlife crisis, and other male characters sexualize her a lot, which can get a little weird. But once we get passed how hot she is, the profound nature of her relationship with her husband develops, and it is so much more than meets the eye. One of the pleasures of this story is seeing this love story unfolds through Justin's recollection, but also through the things he finds out about how far Tessa went to protect him, how much she was willing to sacrifice to keep him safe. Yes. That sounds like Miss Abbott. Can you tell me, please: when did she make the reservation at your hotel, and how? I believe you have an office in Nairobi. Over.”