Nigel Williams
The Constant Gardener by John le Carr (Hodder & Stoughton)
John le Carr’s novels may go on the shelves next to Tom Clancy (and sell as many copies) but if his popularity is due to a belief that he adheres to the Boy Scout code of fiction, then his public are reading him for the wrong reasons. His books have been formed by the nature of the Cold War; they are one of the most thorough and historically useful guides to the mentality of those who ran it that we have.
But for this author, the “spy novel” if there is such a thing is a metaphor for examining the extremes of the human soul. What interests him is how far the “reasonable man” will go if he is pushed. George Smiley may be a fictional construct as loved and universally recognised as Sherlock Holmes, but he wins us over because of his humanity, not because of his ability to shoot round corners or deduce things from stray hairs on a carpet.
Since he killed off Smiley, Le Carr’s fiction has been an attempt to generalise and diffuse his marvellous creation through various voices and faces, to accomplish, in other words, the traditional task of the novelist. His new novel gives us, unambiguously, the impression that its creator has suffered all the wrongs of man. It may use the form of the thriller but its moral and artistic concerns go well beyond the task of entertainment.
The Constant Gardener starts in the British embassy in Nairobi, as Sandy Woodrow, the head of chancery, takes a rather nasty phone call. Tessa Quayle, the first secretary’s wife, has been brutally murdered up country. Her companion, Dr Arnold Bluhm, an African as politically committed as she is to the cause of his long-suffering fellow countrymen, has disappeared. Did he murder her? If he didn’t, who did? Were they having an affair? And (this is Sandy speaking now) if they were, how in God’s name are we going to put the tin lid on the shit hitting the fan?
One of the many pleasures of this book is Le Carr’s way with the clichs favoured by the upper-class British establishment. On the novel’s opening page, we are told that Sandy takes the shocking news “like a bullet, jaw rigid, chest out, smack through his divided English heart”, and the language is, as so often in Le Carr, intended to deceive.
Sandy may seem to be the book’s hero, but is he? Similarly, Justin Quayle, Tessa’s husband is, on first acquaintance, brought to our attention as more hooray than hero, a child to Woodrow’s man. He is shown holding a brandy glass “as if it were a prize” and, at her funeral, seems to be standing close enough to her grave to allow it to symbolise the end of his, as well as her, career.
It is only as Justin’s quest for his wife’s murderers turns into a crusade that this masterly storyteller begins to show his hand. As Quayle flies round the world, on the tail of a sinister pharmaceutical company which has found friends among his English Establishment masters, this second-XI Englishman acquires heroic status.
But if redemption through suffering sounds a bit creepily Christian, be not alarmed. Le Carr never lets up on the jeopardy in which he places his central character and the real issues he is confronting from corruption in Kenya to the self-deception with which embassy wives console themselves are never out of his sights. This is a work of fierce political intelligence, tackling the key question of the failure of the West to deal with all those things that the collapse of communism should have made easier to confront Third World poverty, corporate greed and political cynicism.
The Constant Gardener’s conclusion may be sombre, but the book breathes life, anger and excitement until the casual, near-brutal realism of its last sentence.