Fiction, Fiction Subjects

The Constant Gardener

Name: The Constant Gardener
Author: John le Carre
ISBN: 9781416503903

by John le Carre

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Overview

THE CONSTANT GARDENER

Tessa Quayle—young, beautiful, and dearly beloved to husband Justin—is gruesomely murdered in northern Kenya. When Justin sets out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he finds could make him not only a suspect, but also a target for Tessa's killers.

A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, John le Carre portrays the dark side of unbridled capitalism as only he can. In The Constant Gardener he tells a compelling, complex story of a man elevated through tragedy, as Justin Quayle—amateur gardener, aging widower, and ineffectual bureaucrat—discovers his own natural resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

Synopsis

Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. What he might know and what he ultimately learns make him suspect among his own colleagues and a target for the profiteers who killed his wife.

A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism. His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.

BusinessWeek - Patrick Smith

John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener ranks with The Russia House as the best he has produced since hitting his peak. If this new book is craft rather than art, it is craft of the very highest caliber. It is no mean feat to entertain while also making a reader think. Yet Le Carre pull this off admirably, weaving together several themes—corporate power, underdevelopment, globalization—that will resonate with a wide audience.

About the Author, John le Carre

Any spy novelist working today must contend with the legacy of John le Carré, and it's a rare author who earns comparison with the master. Le Carré's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and his trilogy starring British intelligence hero George Smiley and nemesis "Karla" are classics of Cold War literature, but the closing of that era has not left le Carré at loose ends: His later novels have departed for new milieus with no sacrifice of intrigue.

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Editorials

From the Publisher

"Amazingly seductive, pulling you in deeper all the time."

—David Halberstam

"Brilliant."

—The Washington Post Book World

Patrick Smith

From The Critics

A young, beautiful Englishwoman, Tessa Quayle (think of Princess Diana's looks and Mother Teresa's missionary zeal) has been gruesomely murdered near Northern Kenya's Lake Turkana. Tessa had been traveling with Dr. Arnold Bluhm, a black African physician and fellow missionary who has since vanished. The police and Fleet Street have cast the attractive, charismatic Bluhm as her lover and murderer. Yet Justin Quayle, Tessa's devoted and much-older husband, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, has other suspicions. A decent, though not extraordinary, man, Justin is so devastated by his wife's brutal death that he begins a dangerous odyssey in hopes of understanding the mystery of her final days. Relentlessly following a trail of clues through Africa, Italy, Germany and Canada, Justin uncovers secrets about a multinational pharmaceutical firm and its new anti-TB drug, Dypraxa, which has been rushed to market in Africa despite serious side effects. Though the novel has a surfeit of beautiful women and not enough ambiguity between good and evil, Le Carré (author of The Russia House) delivers a deeply compelling and complex story, full of deceptions and betrayals.
—James Schiff

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As the world seems to move ever further beyond the comparatively clear-cut choices of the Cold War into a moral morass in which greed and cynicism seem the prime movers, le Carr 's work has become increasingly radical, and this is by far his most passionately angry novel yet. Its premise is similar to that of Michael Palmer's Miracle Cure--cynical pharmaceutical firm allied with devious doctors attempts to foist on the world a flawed but potentially hugely profitable drug--but the difference is in the setting and the treatment. Le Carr has placed the prime action in Africa, where the drug is being surreptitiously tested on poor villagers. Tessa Quayle, married to a member of the British High Commission staff in corruption-riddled contemporary Kenya, gets wind of it and tries in vain to blow the whistle on the manufacturer and its smarmy African distributor. She is killed for her pains. At this point Justin Quayle, her older, gentlemanly husband, sets out to find out who killed her, and to stop the dangerous drug himself--at a terrible cost. Le Carr 's manifold skills at scene-setting and creating a range of fearsomely convincing English characters, from the bluffly absurd to the irredeemably corrupt, are at their smooth peak here. Both The Tailor of Panama and Single & Single were feeling their way toward this wholehearted assault on the way the world works, by a man who knows much better than most novelists writing today how it works. Now subject and style are one, and the result is heart-wrenching. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In the absence of the Evil Empire, global capitalism takes it on the chin once more in this hypertrophied whodunit, the most intimate of le Carré's thrillers since the salad days of George Smiley. Tessa Quayle, an aid worker married to a much older career diplomat currently stationed in Nairobi, has always managed her ambiguous relationship to Sorbonne-trained African Dr. Arnold Bluhm with admirable discretion. But now the lid is blown off their companionship by the news that Tessa's been found raped and murdered during an expedition she and Bluhm made from a North Kenyan lodge. Among the hothouse world of the British legation, which le Carré limns with merciless precision, the whispers start overnight, soon confirmed by the police announcement that the evidence against the missing Dr. Bluhm is conclusive. After hovering over Sandy Woodrow, who jeopardized his career as Head of Chancery in Nairobi when he sent Tessa a note asking her to elope with him, le Carré follows Tessa's widower, inoffensive amateur gardener Justin Quayle, whose grilling by a pair of Scotland Yard officers fans into flame his suspicion that the confinement in Uhuru Hospital that ended his muckraking wife's pregnancy in stillbirth revealed to her a secret dangerous enough to kill for. Beneath the ceremonious blather of the diplomatic corps, the police, the Home Office, and pharmaceutical giant Karel Vita Hudson, Justin finds a conspiracy as broad and greedy as the scandals of Single & Single, and as ruthless in protecting its turf. He follows the trail from Italy to Germany to Canada to a showdown in the Sudan with a pitiable villain who, like everyone else in this elegantlyoverextendednovel, just can't stop talking. Under all the sumptuous detail, sensitive psychology, and incisive condemnation of industrial cartels, this is still at its core the old, familiar story of a decent man driven to avenge the wife he never really knew.