La constance du jardinier (The Constant Gardener) Book

"Drugs have got to be tried on somebody, haven't they?" If I had to come up with just one word to describe this genre-defying book, it would be "angry". Or maybe two words - angry and disillusioned. Or, if you want a third, then angry, disillusioned and bleak. And that's where its strength is.
"Issue one: the side effects are being deliberately concealed in the interest of profit. Issue two: the world's poorest communities are used as guinea pigs by the world's richest. Issue three: legitimate scientific debate of these issues is stifled by corporate intimidation."
This was my first exposure to John Le Carré, and I guess I was expecting a thriller. What I got wasn't quite fitting the bill as I imagined it. Which is a good thing, I come to think. And yet my brain kept trying to fit it into a category. Thriller? Not in the conventional sense. Suspense? Not so much. Murder mystery? Nah, there's a murder but not much mystery. Exposé? Perhaps but not quite.

What this ended up being in the end is a book of ruminations. Angry, disillusioned, bleak ruminations - on colonialism and corruption and capitalism and corporations and greed and power and abuses of it and secrets and martyrdom and marriage and guilt and complacencies and prejudices and condescension and well-fed indifference in the face of complacent satisfaction with profits. It's a book that does not throw you a feel-good bone at any point, no rays of sunshine, no silver linings. No long-awaited and expected happy endings or vindications or comeuppances, really. The parasites in power are in power for a reason, after all. And I respect it ' I hate the bleakness of it, but I respect the hell out of it. Le Carre doesn't pull punches, and mostly gets it right.
"I mean, Jesus. Foreign Office isn't in the business of passing judgment on the safety of nonindigenous drugs, is it? Supposed to be greasing the wheels of British industry, not going round telling everybody that a British company in Africa is poisoning its customers. You know the game. We're not paid to be bleeding hearts. We're not killing people who wouldn't otherwise die. I mean, Christ, look at the death rate in this place. Not that anybody's counting."
It's an angry and bleak story of rich and powerful pharma mowing down those standing in the way of shareholders' profits (to sum up, "Old, established, British-based company is poisoning innocent Kenyans, using 'em as guinea pigs"), hand in hand with both "civilized" and overtly corrupt governments, seemingly impartial scientists, organized and less-so-organized crime ' and those on the other end whose lives and health are deemed expendable in the pursuit of more lucrative markets. As a slimy character genuinely inquires at some point, "Drugs have got to be tried on somebody, haven't they? I mean, who do you choose, for Christ's sake? Harvard Business School?"
"I am thinking I don't believe in me anymore, and all I stood for. That there was a time when, like the people in this building, your Justin took pride in submitting himself to the harsher judgments of a collective will--which he happened to call Country, or the Doctrine of the Reasonable Man or, with some misgiving, the Higher Cause. There was a time when I believed it was expedient that one man--or woman --should die for the benefit of many. I called it sacrifice, or duty, or necessity. There was a time when I could stand outside the Foreign Office at night and stare up at its lighted windows and think: Good evening, it's me your humble servant, Justin. I'm a piece of the great wise engine, and proud of it. I serve, therefore I feel. Whereas all I feel now is: it was you against the whole pack of them and, unsurprisingly, they won."
My buddy-read partner Justin (no relation to Le Carré's protagonist - I assume) brought my attention to Le Carré's ear for language when depicting the speech of foreigners proficient in English but still foreigners enough for their "different" speech patterns to creep into otherwise almost immaculate English. Convincing "foreigner" speech is not easy to get across, and in hands of so many can be really cringeworthy, but Le Carré - perhaps based on his own years in non English-speaking countries - gets the subtle speech patterns and cadences just right, with echoes of a particular speaker's language visible just enough to not convey that subtle mockery that foreigners' speech can easily be colored with in the English-language literature.

Sadly, the main weakness for me was Tessa's character. Tessa Quayle, an activist/martyr/crusader, whose brutal murder sets off the novel. Tessa, who comes off as an impassioned saint with that posthumous sheen of someone who's undeniably in the right, the shiny beacon of humanity in the darkness of the world. It's that damn posthumous sainthood of her that's transmitted by every "good" character in their recollection of her that made her characterization weak for me, too cartoonishly annoyingly perfect to ever feel real. Maybe it was deliberate, the posthumous veneration - but it rang too simplistic, too didactic, too one-dimensional, unlike many other "greyer" characters. She did not seems real, Tessa-the-person, but the already legendary "Mama Tessa". Maybe it was Le Carré's intention all along, to show us the ghost memory of a good person we create rather than the actual layered and complicated human being ' but if so, this gambit backfired for me, making her less well-drawn than the mildly despicable and yet complicated background characters - Sandy, Gloria, Lara and even awfully pathetic Lorbeer.
"She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed."

Le Carré fares much better though with Justin Quayle, the "constant gardener", the man once satisfied leading "equal and parallel lives" with his passionate wife, a polite mild-mannered man believing in the way things are ' just to be shaken out of that complacency and to become and a thorn in the side of pretty much everyone with stakes in the lucrative game of pharma and politics and big money. The once quiet polite man no longer worried about causing offense ' that was done convincingly well, all the way to the ending that I hated and yet could not see happening in any other way.
"So what changed that?" Lesley asked.
"We did," Justin retorted with fervor. He meant the other we. We her survivors. We the guilty ones. "With our complacency," he said, lowering his voice. "With this." And here he made a gesture that embraced not just the dining room and Gloria's hideous watercolors impaled along the chimney breast, but the whole house round them, and its occupants, and by inference the other houses in the street. "We who are paid to see what's going on, and prefer not to. We who walk past life with our eyes down."
It took me a moment to gather my thoughts and figure out where I stand on this book. It certainly could have been trimmed quite a bit, making it much tighter. It certainly could have given a bit more subtlety to Tessa Quayle. It certainly could have made Justin Quayle a bit less laughably clueless about computers. But then it still managed to create something special out of the bleak conspiracy and slightly hopeful rather than crushing defeat and the unfathomable power imbalances. And that managed to work, although in a rather depressing way. But hey, there are comfort reads elsewhere and this book doesn't need to be one. This one is meant to make you unsettled, and in that, it succeeds.

Rounding to 4 bleak angry stars.
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Thanks for buddy read, Justin! I would not have picked up a Le Carré book without your enthusiasm for his writing.