The Constant Gardener

Chinese pop music, I feel, is obviously the best background music when writing about a legal – or is that pharmaceutical? -- thriller. Here are some of my thoughts on John Le Carré’s "The Constant Gardener". But before we begin, allow me to snicker a bit over his name. English? Tête carrée? Le Carré? Get it?

All right, I’m done.

I don’t usually read books that could in any way be categorized as thrillers, so keep in mind that the following is an opinion almost totally devoid of knowledge of the genre, unless you count my reading "The Firm" and "Jurassic Park" way back when the movies were still relatively recent as the basis of some sort of authority. Since I can’t compare it to anything, really, I’ll only be relating my feelings on the book, instead of constantly naming other authors or previous works.

So there I found myself, with a copy of "The Constant Gardener" being pressed into my hands by someone who’d just read it and enjoyed it immensely. 566 pages (don’t be fooled, the last 4 are an author’s note!) not being enough to daunt me, I put it aside in my to-read pile and then carried it around town with me for two weeks. Ah, the joys of a constant companion on the bus…

The story is a classic tale of revenge. Specifically, one man’s quest to avenge the murder of his wife. Or, more precisely, to expose the cover-up that led to the murder of his wife, engineered by pharmaceutical giants and aided and abetted by none other than people from his own ranks, that is to say the British High Commission in Kenya. Using every spy trick he knows, Justin Quayle retraces his lawyer wife’s investigations into a new miracle drug being pushed on the African market and discovers many horrors along the way. The author, however, points out in his afterword that what he has written is no more shocking than a holiday greeting card when compared to what actually goes on behind the closed doors of the world’s multinational health conglomerates.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes, I did, though it took me a while to get into it because the first chapters are mostly about the detestable Sandy Woodrow, a self-important and lecherous character I did not warm to at all. But that was probably the point.

Fortunately, the spotlight is soon on the dapper Mr. Quayle, reeling from the recent brutal murder of his beloved Tessa. He, as opposed to Sandy Woodrow, is in almost every respect the perfect English Gentleman (the kind of man I’d no doubt long for, if I were interested in men; can I have the female version, please?). I say in almost every respect because he has the sometimes confusing tendency to interact with his deceased wife, asking her opinion and generally listening to her advice and sly comments. I wondered if this sort of thing was what people meant when they told me that John Le Carré’s writing is confusing, because I found the plot rather straight-forward despite its complexity. Or maybe his writing has gotten more lucid with time? At any rate, the only confusing thing about the novel, aside from Justin’s imaginings, were a few instances of unusual sentence structure, the kind that had me reading the line over again with different inflections before it made sense.

This tale is far from happy, but I never really felt very much of the main character’s pain. Possibly because he has such a stiff upper lip about it, but also I think because the style of writing is of that almost dry, precise, sometimes witty tone that I can only associate with British mystery writers, and which I cannot really absorb as tragedy. Tragic things happen, and it is sadly like the real world where big companies can drag their feet through the courts for years without any accountability for their crimes, but there is (thankfully) no attempt at coaxing tears from the reader. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone, but though it surprised me somewhat, it seemed mostly inevitable that the loose ends be tied up that way.