The Constant Gardener is the first book by John le Carré that I have read. The story is quite simple. Tessa Quayle is a social activist trying to create a positive change in the lives of those living in Kenya. Her husband, Justin Quayle, works in the British High Commission in Nairobi. The High Commission thinks of her as a trouble-maker since her approach is the opposite of the slow, bureaucratic procedures through which aid work is carried out in Africa. It seems that all the donors towards Africa are donating only because they get something in return, such a tax-break in their home country. The middlemen are looking to make a profit for themselves. The African governments who receive the aid on behalf of the people make sure they get a cut of their own, or they will throw a spanner in the works. Tessa is working against all of this and is very vocal about it.

Justin is about twenty years older than Tessa, who is around twenty-five. The book opens with the Sandy Woodrow, Head of Chancery at the High Commission, receiving news of Tessa’s murder somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Turkana. She was touring with Dr. Arnold Bluhm, a Belgian doctor of African origin who works with one of the aid agencies. Tessa and Arnold are almost of the same age, both extremely beautiful and have spent the previous night in the same room. The press quickly picks up the story and the High Commission has a scandal on its hands. The story moves very slowly in the beginning. It is only a quarter of the way into the story after Tessa’s funeral is over that Justin emerges as the protagonist of the book. Till that time the story moves primarily from the perspective of Sandy Woodrow while Justin is a mere presence in the lower ground floor of his house.

It is clear from the circumstantial evidence that the objective of the murder was neither robbery nor rape. One school of thought pins the blame on Bluhm, who is missing. Another school lays the blame on Justin. A third school of thought believes that a much bigger power ordered the murder in order to silence her. The rest of the story follows Justin trotting across the globe trying to piece together what Tessa was working on, meeting people she was in contact with, stringing together bits of letters and emails of hers into one full picture. Two powerful pharmaceutical giants emerge as the suspects, and Justine tries to find the people who are in-charge of it.

The story leaps across time and space from one chapter to the next, however the overall effect remains quite tepid. The story is not very believable unless you are a fan of conspiracy theories. Once the basic facts are laid down, there is not much left to guess. The second half of the book is quite predictable. Most of the characters seem to be contrived and are forced to become vehicles to carry forward the story. Perhaps, if the story was focused more on how the various forces at play interact amongst themselves, the story might have left a stronger impression. The bosses in the Foreign Office in London, MI-6 and the multinational corporations are all dependent on each other to meet their ends. The hunt for Tessa’s murderers simply pales when compared to the full scale of corruption in Africa that is suggested in the background. Towards the end, Africa seems to be a much more complex place outside of the story that we have been reading. The author himself admits something similar in a note at the end of the book.

The prose is quite creaky. One of the key pieces of advice that Stephen King gives in On Writing is to avoid using adverbs. At the time of reading that book, it seemed to be a didactic and subjective advice without much substance. The Constant Gardener is a good of example of why this advice is useful. Le Carré spews out adverbs left and right. There are some other idiosyncrasies that are hard to ignore, like the phrase “soldier’s son” which is repeatedly used as an adjective to describe Sandy Woodrow’s actions. This gets tiresome as his actions do not speak for themselves. Justine is repeatedly said to have become lost in his internal world without actually stating what is so interesting in there. The title itself seems ill-fitting. This is a book that you can easily do without reading.