REVIEW BY ALISON DELLIT
The Constant Gardener
By John Le Carre
Hodder & Stoughton, 2001
508pp., $49.95 (hb)
"The subject of The Constant Gardener is the dilemma of decent people struggling against the ever-swelling tide of heedless corporate greed, and our own complacency in letting the corporations get away with it — even, at government level helping them to do so" — John Le Carre, The Spectator, Christmas edition, 2000.
John Le Carre has never been your average spy novelist. Despite maintaining blockbuster status since the 1960s, his work has always been more concerned with spy vs spymaster than spy vs spy. With the end of the Cold War, Le Carre's books have become increasingly concerned with the rapaciousness of unchecked imperialism, tackling the Israeli occupation of Palestine in The Little Drummer Girl and the US invasion of Panama in The Tailor of Panama. In his latest offering he takes on "unbridled capitalism".
The theme of Constant Gardener is a familiar one for Le Carre — the struggle of an individual against a shadowy conspiracy of powerful stakeholders. But in this case the conspirators consist of multinational pharmaceutical companies (pharmas), the medical establishment and the British government. They are conspiring to protect the companies' profits, even at a significant cost of human life.
For those cursing me for revealing the plot — don't. The Constant Gardener is never really a whodunnit; it's more of a howdunnit. But mostly it's a tale of individual redemption, and the struggle to remain ethical in the face of debilitating dehumanisation.
The story begins when Tessa Quayle, human rights activist and wife to Foreign Office official Justin Quayle, is found murdered in northern Kenya along with her driver. Her close collaborator and rumoured lover, Dr Arnold Bluhm, is missing.
Tessa Quayle's latest investigation had been into a drug being distributed to Kenyan women, Dypraxa, which she suspected had not completed a clinical trial period. As it becomes clear the British authorities are more interested in finding and destroying all of her research than in punishing her killers or finding Dr Bluhm, Justin eludes his Foreign Office "minders" and takes off to discover what got Tessa killed.
The journey he embarks on reveals a corporate-controlled world where the underdeveloped countries are treated like guinea pigs for the lucrative First World market, where drug side-effects are denied and clinical trials cancelled to avoid bad publicity. Foreign aid is used to open markets for private investment, and medical journals are simply mouthpieces for the pharmas. Corrupt Third World governments are controlled by the US, with UK government backing, and integrity is bought and sold every day. Thousands of Africans die as a result.
Le Carre is using his novel, which like his other books is a guaranteed best-seller, to campaign against the power of pharmas and other multinationals which distribute their products. In the author's note, following the standard disclaimers about the book being fiction, he writes: "But I can tell you this. As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard."
Indeed, one of The Constant Gardener's characters, chemist Lara Emrich, loses her job (and her career) when she attempts to go public with her concerns about possible side effects from Dypraxa. She watches powerlessly as her own research is repackaged to "prove" that the drug is safe.
This has strong parallels to the case of Canadian scientist Dr Nancy Olivieri, who was disciplined by her employers, Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, when she attempted to publish negative data on the drug she had developed, which was funded by Apotex Pharmaceuticals. Olivieri found herself the victim of death threats, and lawsuits — she, like Le Carre's Lara, had signed a contract giving the pharma control over all her communications about the drug, public or private.
With the current publicity about Third World attempts to manufacture generic versions of patented drugs, the book has been timed well. But far from simply being an attack on one sort of multinational, Le Carre uses the pharmaceutical industry to explain the corroding power of imperialist capitalism as a whole, with its network of banks, corporations and governments. "I want you to tell your Mister Quayle that if he keeps coming at me, there's fuck all I can do to help him because he's taking on the world, not me!" screams the head of Le Carre's fictional multinational ThreeBees. And indeed he is.
Le Carre's outrage gives the novel an edge which most of his books lack. We feel it through the anger of Tessa, who, while dead, is ever present through the recollections and obsessions of the other characters. Tessa's determination to reject her class and race loyalties provides a moral scale against which almost every character measures himself or herself at some point.
Le Carre is at his strongest when tackling the upper classes. Far from being the "conspiracy theorist" that sections of the capitalist media have portrayed him as, Le Carre reveals a world where social networks and financial obligations interweave so thoroughly that politicians, senior civil servants and business executives automatically assume a common interest. To do otherwise is to break the "code" and betray your own. In a "counselling" session, the head of personnel for the Foreign Office snaps at Justin, "It's really quite extraordinary ... that Tessa was ever allowed to become that person".
While the book is primarily an attack on the power of the pharmaceutical corporations, it is the British civil servants who Le Carre savages most. He is able to be merciless because he understands so keenly the mechanisms of self-deception that allow humans to assist in the death of hundreds, and then dress for dinner. His characters never stretch themselves beyond the reach of empathy, even when they are morally repulsive. So we have a spy who daydreams during a conversation about expedient murder, thinking about the local black football team he has poured his savings into. Yet by understanding the reasons for the decisions they make, we are all the more free to condemn them.
Le Carre writes of the upper-class diplomats like an insider, which is not surprising given that he worked for the British secret service in the 1950s. The son of a con-man, he once told the press of the strain during those years of pretending an upper-class background that he did not have.
The conundrum his book explores is not really how things can be changed, but rather how integrity can be maintained.
In this lies the book's strength and its weakness. This is no pat Erin Brokovitch style individual-takes-on-nasty-corporation-and-wins novel. But neither is it the call to arms that Le Carre obviously wants it to be. His saintly Tessa is perhaps a little too saintly, and not, in the end, particularly effective. She has the courage to step outside the "system", to recognise that the upper-class mates' network will never make the world a better place. But she has nothing with which to replace it.
The Constant Gardener is a fabulous read. Le Carre is one of the very few suspense novelists who can actually pull off a 500-page novel. His dialogue crackles, his descriptions are a delight, and the plot unfurls like the perfect wave. It is rare that such well-crafted left-wing novels come along. Those we have are worth savouring.