John le Carre: The Constant Gardener

Hodder and Stoughton

$44.95


Reviewed by Michele Hewitson

Opening this new le Carre novel is like walking into a room and finding it full of echoes. Full of the echoes of the best of le Carre's past and careful prose; of his cautious and brave and strange Englishmen.

The constant gardener of the title is a career diplomat, Justin Quayle, who is based in Nairobi and who is a man who would rather tend his flowerbeds than involve himself in the politics of the diplomatic corps.

He is also an Englishman abroad who delights in opening his garden to junior embassy staff - and who serves them strawberries and cream and chilled white wine as he conducts the guided tour around his "Elysium". The only boast this modest man has been heard to make is that "one year's gardening in Kenya is worth ten in England."

Quayle seems an unlikely candidate for bravery. His outstanding feature appears to be his blamelessness; his ability to keep his head down and his fingers in the soil.

If he appears feckless, it is his wife Tessa who is the fearless one. She is already a ghost when the book opens: her body has been found in a jeep in a remote outpost in the north. The driver has been decapitated, and Tessa's travelling companion, a black activist doctor, is missing from the vehicle.

It looks gratifyingly tidy to the British Government. Tessa and her doctor friend, the missing Bluhm, have been investigating dodgy trialing of a tuberculosis drug on poor black patients. The government, apparently in cahoots with the big pharmaceutical companies, is more than happy to have it put about that Tessa was killed by Bluhm, with whom she was allegedly having an affair.

Justin, as constant in his understated love for Tessa as for his freesias, sets off on a journey through countries; through the sticky web of cyberspace; through the even knottier concepts of redemption and loyalty - and bravery, which does not come naturally - to discover something like the truth.

Through such labyrinthine roamings Justin is following a map to the heart of corruption as written by a master cartographer. "What he needed now was one plunge into the heart of her secret world; to recognise each signpost and milestone along her journey; to extinguish his own identity and revive hers; to kill Justin, and bring Tessa back to life."

The major problem with this journey through constancy - and it walks hand in hand alongside the conspiracy - is not that we never got a picture of Tessa alive. It's possible to accept that redemption, or, indeed, character, might be sought in continuing Tessa's fight for exposure of the corrupt. It's not so easy to accept Tessa's character.

She is the voice in Justin's ear, and in the reader's, and she comes close to being beatified. Beautiful, young, beloved, committed to fighting the forces of corporate evil. Who could speak ill of such dead?

Passionate about her cause, Tessa becomes the voice from beyond the grave who speaks of intrigue and atrocity. It's a handy device for the author - and it becomes the polemic around his neck.

Which is unfortunate. Because of the echoes of past le Carre that are heard in more ways than through the writing. Le Carre seems able to tune his author's antennae (or his very good spy contacts?) into the signals of the intrigue of the time. Just as, or before, the story breaks.

At a time when there is a pandemic of infectious diseases in sub-Saharan Africa, he comes out with a book which examines the machinations of the big pharmaceutical companies and politics. (Last May, Clinton issued an executive order which effectively blocked Africa's efforts to access to cheaper, generic, Aids drugs.)

So, The Constant Gardener is timely, nicely timed and has enough twists and thrills to satisfy the aficionado. It is, though, and in its end, which seems to shrug its shoulders against the inevitable, a failed rail at that true constant: corrupt business.

What remains are mere echoes of the master.

*Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.

*John le Carre is the guest at the first New Zealand Herald Dymocks Literary Lunch on March 5.