Dear Sarah,
Nor have I cooked anything much more challenging than a grilled cheese sandwich lately. On the baneful longterm effects of ambitious cooking we agree. But on le Carré ‘s latest, I think, not at all.
I wasn’t sure, on balance, that we did read the same book. I’m a huge le Carré fan, and I wanted to love The Constant Gardener. I did love bits of it (on which, more later). But the longer I read, the more I cringed: at the plot, which lacks the usual sinuous intricacy of le Carré’s work; at the uncharacteristically Manichean moral scheme; even at the writing, which I think is badly marred by indignation.
Le Carré’s target is the multinational cynicism that allows big pharmaceutical companies to test their new drugs on the wretched of the third world–in this case, of Kenya, where a huge “pharma” is testing a fast-acting cure for tuberculosis and studiously ignoring its calamitous side effects.
I’m perfectly prepared to believe that le Carré is describing reality. But this is no test of a work of fiction. In The Constant Gardener, many elements of the tale simply clank in ways that the spy craft never did: Here is the professor whose role is to show how the pharmas buy off critical researchers; here is the watchdog group whose chief will explain that pharmaceutical companies make good drugs, too; here are the huge, fortresslike buildings behind whose walls the malefactors hide; here is the individual human guinea pig whose presence in the book illustrates the larger harm. The good guys are so good (if dead), and the bad guys are so bad, and their respective roles in the scheme of things are so clearly laid out at the beginning that le Carré doesn’t leave us much food for thought.
He understands, of course, that there is an ambiguous dimension to his choice of villain: The pharmas are, after all, trying to bring needed drugs onto the market–in addition to wanting to make billions from exploiting them. They’re hardly the same creatures as the drug lords of Single & Single or The Night Manager. But even this understanding is couched in ill-digested boilerplate. “Not all doctors can be seduced, not all pharmaceutical companies are careless and greedy,” the head of a pharmaceutical watchdog group tells Justin Quayle. “The modern pharmaceutical industry is only sixty-five years old. It has good men and women, it has achieved human and social miracles, but its collective conscience is not developed.”
This is fair journalism, but it makes for bad fiction. No one ever had to tell George Smiley, “The West may sometimes use ruthless means toward its democratic ends, but at least we believe in universal suffrage” or, “The Communists are worse than we are, but a wholesome ideal first animated the Russian revolution.” Ambiguity was always a given–it was the very soul of the Smiley books–whereas in The Constant Gardener it is an awkward amendment to le Carré ‘s luxuriant sense of outrage.
As for plot: We can deal with the fact that the book’s most vibrant character, its moral center, is already dead when the curtain rises. (I didn’t feel, in answer to your question, that le Carré ever really succeeded in animating Tessa. How could she be so commanding at the age of 25? And her great beauty feels a little implausible, like a maraschino cherry to sweeten up the plot.) We can deal with the fact that the basic story line involves having the protagonist retrace past action. But when you add in the basic absence of mystery–we know pretty much who the villains are, and what they did, fairly early in the book–the books seems almost audaciously underplotted.
I know, I know: The book’s heart is Justin’s growth from the checked-out moral coward he is at the beginning to a man who embraces his wife’s courage. I liked this story; I liked Justin a lot; but I never completely bought him as the anesthetized petty bureaucrat who fusses over his freesia given that this Justin is bracketed by the one who courted Tessa and the one who sets out to avenge her. (Also, a minor complaint: I thought the discovery that aims to steer our conclusions about whether Tessa and Bluhm were lovers–am I being opaque enough here?–showed a dreadful lack of self-confidence on le Carré’s part, as if he couldn’t persuade us without throwing in some stagy reassurance.)
The very best characters and scenes in the book, tellingly, are ones that could slip with only minor change into one of the Smiley books: diplomat Sandy Woodrow, for example, the utter toad whose point of view dominates the book’s start, and Justin Quayle’s debriefings by his foreign office superiors upon his return to England. Chapter nine, in which these conversations take place, is a le Carré tour de force–a classic demonstration of the chummy ruthlessness with which power is exercised by polite F.O. survivors.
A passage from his club lunch with Sir Bernard Pellegrin, mandarin in charge of Africa:
“All journalists are shits,” Pellegrin declared confidently, still from inside his menu… “Did you want to take a machine gun to the lot of ‘em?””Not really.””Me too. Illiterate bunch of hypocrites. Herring fillet’s all right. Smoked eel makes me fart. Sole meuniere’s good if you like sole. If you don’t, have it grilled.” He was writing on a printed pad. It had SIR BERNARD P printed in electronic capitals at the top, and the food options listed on the left side, and boxes to tick on the right, and space for the member’s signature at the bottom.”A sole would be fine.”Pellegrin doesn’t listen, Justin remembered. It’s what got him his reputation as a negotiator.”Grilled?””Meuniere.”…Pellegrin had very small eyes. Justin hadn’t noticed this before. Or perhaps they were a standard size, but had developed the art of dwindling under enemy fire–the enemy, so far as Justin could determine, being anyone who held Pellegrin to what he had just said, or took the conversation into territory not previously charted by him.
Breezily, with a great show of sympathy, Pellegrin so thoroughly slimes Tessa as to give Justin his last push toward apostasy. This is the sort of delicate conversational violence that le Carré excels at, and I galloped through these passages with the same measure of delight you had in the book.
Also, the book is a reminder that le Carré is a master at the quiet art of setting: Almost every scene in the book, whether set in Tessa’s townhouse, the Nairobi morgue (“Over [the corpses], in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies”), or the aid station in Sudan (though why the action takes us there still mystifies me), conveys a rich sense of place.
So, yes, this novel is full of the pleasures of le Carré’s craft. But I think it adds up to a pleasurable failure. The commonplace you cite–that le Carré has outlived his great subject and therefore has nothing to write about–is indeed way too glib. But the fact remains, the subject of this book is a pale thing compared to the world of Smiley and Peter Guillam and Toby Esterhase and the rest. It may be the difference between the deep, seamless understanding le Carré brought to the Circus and the correct-but-not-intimate researcher’s knowledge he brings to pharmaceutical skulduggery. There’s nothing especially mystical about the difference: Some novelists do manage to imbibe and transform subjects wholly new to them. There is, in theory, no reason why John le Carré couldn’t write a great novel about drug conglomerates.
But this time out, he didn’t. Can you talk me out of this view?
Disappointedly,
Marjorie
