The Constant Gardener: John Le Carré

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The plot of the film is loosely based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria involving antibacterial testing by Pfizer on small children. She had witnessed a monstrous injustice and gone out to fight it. Too late, he too had witnessed it. Her fight was his.” 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.”

I mean, Jesus. Foreign Office isn't in the business of passing judgment on the safety of nonindigenous drugs, is it? Supposed to be greasing the wheels of British industry, not going round telling everybody that a British company in Africa is poisoning its customers. You know the game. We're not paid to be bleeding hearts. We're not killing people who wouldn't otherwise die. I mean, Christ, look at the death rate in this place. Not that anybody's counting.” Take a minor duo here, the police pair Rob and Lesley. They are brilliantly drawn - fragments of working-class le Carré gophers of old reassembled for the postmodern world. The same is true of the High Commission spook Donohue, with his bloodhound face, radio dials and knowledge of everything before it happens. Donohue's golf-playing, mutually parasitical relationship with Kenny "K" Curtiss, the Maxwell-like entrepreneur whose shady ThreeBees outfit sells the bad pills for the Swiss in Africa, is very effectively rendered. It is also instructive. Is this the way le Carré will go now, laying bare the provisionality of relationships between states and multinationals and those who work for them, as before he dealt with the fate of individuals caught up in cold-war contingencies and the decline of post-imperial Britain? They knew, Woodrow told himself in fury as he returned downstairs. They knew before I did that she was dead. But that’s what they want you to believe: we spies know more about everything than you do, and sooner. 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. Like most John Le Carre film adaptions I’ve seen, the Constant Gardener is a good one. In fact i don’t believe I’ve experienced a bad Ralph Fiennes or Rachel Weisz film so congrats on the casting choices.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. 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.

Woodrow struggled to get his words together. “The police say Noah was decapitated. Is that right? Over.” You’re worrying about Arnold, I expect,” he told Ghita, in the helpful tone of a stranger indicating the way.

SPOILERS AHEAD

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.”

The Constant Gardener is the perfect title for this novel in that it's a double entendre that describes two important aspects of Justin, our titular “constant gardener.” He was brought up to join the ''family firm,'' as his father called the Foreign Office, and he has cultivated the image of ''a sweet chap passionately interested in nothing except phlox, asters, freesias and gardenias.'' Justin gardened “constantly, in one sense, as an escape from a world he viewed as very dark: ’'Man was vile and evermore would be so. The world contained a small number of reasonable souls of whom Justin happened to be one. Their job, in his simple view, was to head off the human race from its worst excesses -- with the proviso that when two sides were determined to blow each other to smithereens, there was precious little a reasonable person could do about it.’'

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Connecting local deaths to trials of a new drug, Dypraxa, conducted by Kenyan-based company Three Bees, Tessa and Arnold write a damaging report on the drug. She gives it to Justin's colleague Sandy Woodrow, the British High Commissioner, who sends it to Sir Bernard Pellegrin, head of the Africa Desk at the Foreign Office. Pellegrin responds with an incriminating letter to Sandy, which Tessa persuades him to show her, and she steals it before departing for Loki with Arnold. Atkinson, Michael (23 August 2005). "Cold Comfort Pharm". The Village Voice . Retrieved 11 November 2017.