Product Description

Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has disappeared.

Her husband, Justin, a career diplomat and amateur gardener at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. His quest takes him to the Foreign Office in London, across Europe and Canada and back to Africa, to the depths of South Sudan, and finally to the very spot where Tessa died.

On his way Justin meets terror, violence, laughter, conspiracy and knowledge. But his greatest discovery is the woman he barely had time to love.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42409 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
There were those who feared that the end of the Cold War would deal a fatal blow to the creativity of many first-rate thriller writers who specialised in this territory. In the case of John le Carré, this would have meant the loss of not only Britain's finest thriller writer, but a serious novelist of quite as much literary gravitas as any of his mainstream contemporaries. Certainly, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold remains as utterly compelling today as when it was written, whereas such post-cold war le Carré themes as financial double-dealing seemed to inspire him less than the world of shifting identity he had dealt in so skilfully. But with The Constant Gardener, we have the author once again firing on all cylinders. The characterisation is as elegant and expressive as ever, the prose as limpid and forceful. But, most of all, le Carré has found a theme quite as pregnant as any he has handled in the past: the malign, deceptively ameliorative world of global pharmaceuticals. In the new novel, the customary themes of betrayal and danger are explored in a narrative that exerts a total grip throughout its considerable length. His protagonist, Justin Quayle, is an unreflective British diplomat whose job in the British High Commission in Nairobi suggests one of Graham Greene's dispossessed protagonists trying to survive in the sultry corruption of foreign climates. President Arap Moi's Kenya is a country in the grip of AIDS, while political machinations maintain a deadly status quo. When Quayle's wife (who has taken more interest in what is happening around her than her husband) is killed, his investigation of her murder leads him into a murky web of exploitation involving Kenyan greed and a major pharmaceutical company eager to promote its "wonder cure" for tuberculosis. As Quayle looks deeper into the company which his wife had been investigating, all he has carefully built around him begins to crumble. The steady accumulation of tension and rigorous delineation of character is emblematic of le Carré at his finest, and it is a tremendous pleasure to find the author so resolutely back on form, fired with a real sense of anger at the duplicity of the modern world:

"Specious, unadulterated, pompous Foreign Office bullshit, if you want its full name... trade isn't making the poor rich. Profits don't buy reforms. They buy corrupt government officials and Swiss bank accounts".

Sunday Telegraph
‘A powerful, moving novel ... essential reading'

Review
Praise for The Constant Gardener (: )

'The master storyteller...has lost none of his cunning' (A. N. Wilson, Daily Mail )

'The book breathes life, anger and excitement' (Nigel Williams, Observer )

'A cracking thriller' (Economist )

'Nobody writing today manipulates suspense better. Nobody constructs a more tantalisingly complex plot . . . essential reading' (Chris Woodhead, Sunday Telegraph )

‘Richly detailed, full of righteous fire to offset its desperate prognosis, The Constant Gardener is a very impressive piece of work. It is certainly one of John le Carré’s best books’

Customer Reviews

Thought-provoking thriller
Although some think of John Le Carre's novels as airport/ beach reading, I must whole-heartedly disagree. The Constant Gardener is another fine example of his excellent writing. The plot starts simply when a British Foreign Office worker in Nairobi finds out that his wife has been brutally murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana. She was an aid-worker on her way with a colleague to uncover corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. As the story progresses not only does the husband realise how little he knows about his wife, but we realise that not everyone is as they seem. There are no clear villains in the story, which actually makes it scarily believable. Le Carre deftly weaves the story through different characters' point of view yet even the reader does not discover what really happened until Justin, the husband discovers it. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book; one you can't put down and a great introduction to the wit and skill of John Le Carre's writing.

Coming to grip with internal demons
John le Carré's novels are an acquired taste. It wasn't until I read TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and SMILEY'S PEOPLE, and then viewed the BBC's marvelous screen adaptations of these two books, that I came to appreciate the author's methodically intricate plot and character development that results in more of an identity profile of the chief protagonist than anything else. (For me, le Carré's Smiley will always bring to mind the features of Alec Guiness, who starred in the aforementioned BBC productions.) There are no Bond-like capers here, and those expecting such will become excruciatingly bored.

In THE CONSTANT GARDENER, Justin Quayle is a faceless, government bureaucrat attached to the British High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya. His job is to represent Her Majesty's government on an international committee of other faceless bureaucrats charged with monitoring the efficiency at which aid moneys for the poor and starving reach the intended recipients. The committee has no investigatory authority, so high level and endemic African venality is ignored. On the other hand, Justin's wife, Tessa, belongs to a private group that investigates corruption with a vengeance. Her efforts have uncovered the criminally negligent misuse of a new drug, Dypraxa, designed to treat tuberculosis. The drug's manufacturer, megapharmaceutical KVH, is trialing Dypraxa on the indigenous African population, and apparently covering up the drug's fatal side effects. As THE CONSTANT GARDENER opens, Tessa has been found murdered on a field trip into the African bush. Is there a link?

The storyline unfolds from three viewpoints. First and foremost, there's Justin, whose guilt over his hear-no -evil, see-no-evil detachment from his wife's investigations compels him to follow her lead posthumously, reopen the probe in the face of Foreign Office opposition, and attempt to discover the true circumstances of Tessa's demise. (Did KVH have her killed? Was the British government somehow involved?) Then, there are Sandy Woodrow, the ambitious and morally flaccid Head of Chancery for the Brits in Nairobi, and Gita Pearson, an Anglo-Indian admirer of Tessa's employed by the High Commission as a low-level functionary.

The novel's conclusion, like most of life, is painted in muted gray tones, not stark black and white as one might wish. It's certainly an unhappy ending, although that's appropriate considering the nature of Justin's internal demons brought on by his beloved's lonely death. Yet, the evil he confronts is both banal and ambiguous. Perhaps it's a tragedy of the 21st century that such is the nature of the baseness now pervasive in the world, not the more focused deviltry of Hitler, Stalin, or the Red Menace. I guess I'd have to say that I miss the good old days of the Cold War. That period enabled the author to script endings that were personally more satisfying, that of SMILEY'S PEOPLE being a case in point, which engendered more a sense of triumph of "good" over "evil". Thus, while THE CONSTANT GARDENER is meticulously crafted with the usual le Carré penchant for excellence, for me it lacks punch. Where's George Smiley when you need him?

The new "Out of Africa"
Le Carre to me has always represented intrigue, twisted plots with subtle sub-plots, and the master himself George Smiley. In this offering, Le Carre most certainly delivers although dear George doesn't get a look in. The story is woven about the life and death of the wife of a British Diplomat, Tessa Quayle, and the unmasking of a conspiracy that threatens to cripple Anglo-Kenyan relations. The diplomat, Justin Quayle, exhibits classic, even stereo-typical British cool in investigating the real reasons for his young wife's demise, while showing an insight into the strains and pressures of ex-pat officialdom.

Le Carre's strengths in this novel are in the way that some truly undesirable notions are brought to the readers attention, and the fact that he doesn't rose tint them just emphasises some of the realities of how we in the developed 'west' salve our guilt about sickness and poverty in Africa. That having been said, Le Carre also manages to construct a pretty good impression of the raw beauty of Africa and the culture of some of the people there.

If there are any weaknesses in the novel I would say that the ending stopped a little short and left me wondering what would happen next, particularly in London. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book, and now view the multi-national Phamaceuticals in a slightly different light.