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The Constant Gardener
by John le Carré
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Frightening, heartbreaking, and exquisitely calibrated, John le Carré's new novel opens with the gruesome murder of the young and beautiful Tessa Quayle near northern Kenya's Lake Turkana, the birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa's much older husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. The plot was vaguely based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria. A master chronicler of the deceptions and betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, le Carré portrays, in The Constant Gardener, the dark side of unbridled capitalism.…
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"There is actually only one spy in The Constant Gardener , an MI6 officer in Kenya, who I think at one point is involved with Quayle, the lead character, because he needs a piece of information about his dead wife. I chose it simply because it was a huge influence on Typhoon, my latest novel. The idea of having a thriller that was also a love story, and then the political dimension as well. In The Constant Gardener , Le Carré is having a go at big pharmaceutical companies which are testing products on people in Africa. In Typhoon I was trying to let people know what is going on in terms of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the Uighur Muslim province in Northwest China. Having said all that, the most important thing that I can do is to keep people reading the books that I write – to entertain them and interest them in the characters I have created. Writers shouldn’t be preachy. But if at the same time I can add a layer of political commitment to my books, or whatever you want to call it, then that’s a laudable goal, as far as I’m concerned."