What kind of job, you also want to ask, in medias res, is The Constant Gardener? What are the connections between this novel's story and the real-world stories around and before it? Right at the start, mention is made of ‘the sensational case of a young Englishwoman who had been hacked to pieces 10 years ago’ — a clear reference to the Julie Ward case. It doesn't take too much effort to find parallels between le Carré's pharmas and actual ones, either … This is newish ground for one of Britain's most skilful writers, and he works it very well. The enterprise is marred only by constant sniping references to the press … The literary characters at least are fascinating…[and] the African details feel as right and true as the British ones.
The Constant Gardener inhabits a moral universe far less murky than the precincts of ambiguity where le Carré made his name … Le Carré is a superb moralist of the quotidian, a master at showing how our humdrum daily dealings with spouses and colleagues reveal us … The Constant Gardener makes some ungainly narrative moves, using whole chapters of police interrogation to establish basic plot points, and dishing out boatloads of documents for us to sort through. The effort hints at another kind of book altogether — namely, investigative journalism — and as we follow Justin's search for the truth, The Constant Gardener feels ever more like an exposé, an angry diatribe against corporate malfeasance.
We know from the start the pharmaceutical company is the culprit, so there's no suspense to the tale; le Carré thinks we're going to be so fired up by the polemic this novel disguises that we'll forgive him the lack of a true narrative arc. Some of his former strengths seem, suddenly, weaknesses. The ironic patois so many of his characters in the past have affected here seems to be in everyone's mouth; it's like pushing through a population of hyperverbal character actors. The Dickensian panorama of previous le Carré books might have better set off Quayle's limpidness; here, it is not made more interesting by contrast with the character of his dead wife, who is a martyred angel.
While the first half of The Constant Gardener combines the speed and pace of a first-rate mystery with the author's interest in emotional detail, the novel slowly devolves into an altogether conventional thriller, quite devoid of the sort of psychological nuance and moral ambiguities that have distinguished Mr. le Carre's best work. In the latter portions of the novel, the good guys are very good and the bad guys are very bad, and the hero's sympathies are no longer in doubt … Mr. le Carre not only neglects to concoct enough convincing distractions to keep us from figuring out the answers to these questions halfway through the novel but he also fails to make those answers plausible to anyone but the most ardent Oliver Stonian conspiracy theorist.
Around the novel's halfway point, Le Carré exhausts the plot's major twists and turns, having already established the heroes and villains in clear, unambiguous terms. Yet The Constant Gardener unfolds with the righteous energy of muckraking journalism, as the author comes to grips with the ruthless plundering of a vulnerable Third World nation. As Justin quietly and persistently investigates his wife's murder, his touching journey brings him closer to understanding her than when she was alive and wakes him from an indifferent slumber. It's heartening to find that Le Carré, now in his 70s, shares Justin's dogged sense of purpose.
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 elegantly overextended novel, 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.
This is by far his most passionately angry novel yet … Le Carré'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.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
