Dear Marjorie,
I’m so sorry you didn’t enjoy The Constant Gardener as much as I did. When you get past some basic realities about what makes books good, like how well they’re written, there’s no accounting for individual visceral response–just as there’s no accounting for why I thought Peter L. (not his real name) was devastatingly sexy when I was 12 while my friends were inexplicably repelled by the fact that he was as skinny as a snake and smelled strongly of onions. (He didn’t like me, anyway, so the question was an academic one.) By the same token, one person’s thrilling page-turner can easily turn out to be another person’s tedious polemical diatribe as seems to have happened here. It may be that the book just seized something in my imagination a certain way, or that I was moved by the story because it reminded me of something else, or that I read it at a time when I felt particularly receptive to this sort of book, or that I had a huge crush on Justin, the protagonist. Or maybe you’re just a more sensible reader. Or we might have different tastes in fiction, which is fine, too. (We’ve agreed on so many things in previous discussions that it’s nice to disagree for once.)
The biggest problem with the book–and it’s no insignificant thing–is that le Carré, as you rightly point out, gives his game away too early. Somewhere in the first third of the book, the mystery of Tessa’s death is solved. You know the answers to the questions raised by the mysterious death and disappearance of the poor African woman whom Tessa befriended; you know why the three white doctors visited her in the clinic; you know, as you’ve already said, the identity of the bad guys and–sketchily at this point–the nature of their sins. That immediately robs the rest of the book of the sort of suspense that can make le Carré so masterful: I’m thinking of the moment, for example, in Smiley’s People when the reader finally understands what Karla’s Achilles’ heel is, when everything else in the book makes sense and you realize what is actually going on. There is never a moment like that in The Constant Gardener where you learn something that wholly changes the course of the book and quite literally takes your breath away. (Although there are wonderful throwaway revelations, like when you find out a few key personal details about the top British spy in Nairobi, near the end, as he visits the slimy chief of ThreeBees). I missed having a big gotcha moment. But few writers can pull that off every time, and sometimes it’s asking too much.
That’s what prevented the book, for me, from being among le Carré’s very best. But, oddly enough, some of the things that you found most disconcerting were among those I most admired. I found it amazing that le Carré at his age (he’s at least 70) would take on a completely new subject–the scandalous way that pharmaceutical companies treat sick people in developing countries–and write about it with such passion, assurance, and moral indignation. It’s a deeply unsexy subject. But to my mind, le Carré has been able to construct an addictive story around it that not only makes you care about the fate of the main characters in his fiction but also provokes your own fury as you learn more about the sordid realities of the ties between governments and the pharmaceutical industry. His descriptions of the way drugs are tested and marketed, and how reservations about them can be so ruthlessly ignored and repressed, struck me as being very authoritative. Maybe they weren’t–he is a terrific story-teller, after all–but he got me interested in a subject that I knew little about and had always considered one of those things that’s clearly terrible but just too complicated to understand properly. He has a real knack for discussing a subject in a way that sheds light on all its complicated skeins and also makes it understandable.
I also admired Justin and found deeply moving his progress from repressed gardening aficionado to cunning seeker of truth wanting to honor his late wife by finishing the work she had cared about so much. It didn’t ring true to you, but I thought it was plausible that after Tessa and Justin got married, he reverted somewhat to his old way as a Foreign Office drone. The way he saw it (I think), together they made two parts of the same whole–she was the unconventional part and he the conservative one, and that way they could both bring things to the party, as it were. I think that’s not an unusual way to have a marriage. And remember, they hadn’t been married for very long–it can take a long time and lots of vicissitudes for people to mold to one another’s characters. It had suited them very well while she was alive–they seemed very close, from his descriptions, even if they were doing different things–and it wasn’t until after she was gone that he decided that he had to be both of them.
And that’s what happens. I found it thrilling. He begins to incorporate aspects of Tessa into his own character. He almost becomes her. “The civil servant in him was in abeyance,” le Carré writes at one point. “Fired by Tessa’s impatience, Justin ceased to be accountable to anyone but her. If she was scattershot, so would he be. Where she was methodical, he would submit to her method. Where she made an intuitive leap, he would take her hand and they would leap together. Was he hungry? If Tessa wasn’t, neither was he.” I thought that was just lovely, a wonderful way for him to turn his grief at her death and his shame at having failed her in life, as he believes he did, into something meaningful.
Other random thoughts: I loved all the Foreign Office machinations and how the official policy meshed so cleverly with all the personal animosities and jealousies raging around the office. Notice, incidentally, how anyone in the F.O. who cared about something other than work–the head of the office in Nairobi who loved his small disabled daughter so much that he walked around with her strapped to his chest; Ghita, Tessa’s friend, who loved her more than her own career–got sidelined and discredited. I loved Rob and Lesley, the police interrogators whose true nature proves to be one of the big surprises of the first half of the book. I thought the fate of Tessa’s laptop, and those of her friends, was a well-done and nicely modern touch.
And I am a big mushy sentimentalist and a sucker for grand gestures. I thought the ending, especially given my own idealism about Justin and Tessa, was heartbreaking, almost unbearably moving.
I’m not sure I’ve convinced you to like the book more–hell, maybe you even dislike it more–but it’s been nice trying.
Till the next time,
Sarah
P.S.: Grilled cheese sandwiches. Do you slap a piece of cheese on a piece of bread and shove it under the broiler, the way we did when I was growing up–more opportunity for burned food!--or do you fry them up with lots of butter in the pan, which takes longer but is much tastier?
