john le carre the constant gardener review

In “Our Game” (1995), it was the small, mostly Muslim republic of Ingushetia, striving for freedom from Russia, that huge remnant of the defunct Soviet Union in “The Tailor of Panama” (1996), it was the bedevilled isthmus to our south in “Single & Single” (1999), the financial underworld of the new Russian states in “The Constant Gardener” (2000), perfidy in Kenya by the pharmaceutical industry. there, as Robert Lowell wrote decades ago in his poem “July in Washington,” “the stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth.” John le Carré, the leading fictional dramatizer of the clandestine struggle between the capitalist West and the Communist bloc, maintains a brisk trade in hugger-mugger, searching in each new novel for a fresh locale, a newly sore spot. Many outside the borders of the United States, and many within those borders, place its originating center in Washington, D.C.

For decades, it had its capital in the Kremlin and the inner councils of Beijing now it gathers thickly but elusively in the alleys of Baghdad and the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Constant Gardener is a magnificent exploration of the new world order by one of the most compelling and elegant storytellers of our time.Hugger-mugger is part of life, especially under modern political conditions. Justin Quayle, amateur gardener and ineffectual bureaucrat, seemingly oblivious to his wife's cause, discovers his own resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love.

His eighteenth novel is also the profoundly moving story of a man whom tragedy elevates.

The plot was vaguely based on a real-life case in Kano, Nigeria.Ī 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. 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. Her putative African lover and traveling companion, a doctor with one of the aid agencies, has vanished from the scene of the crime. 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.

John le carre the constant gardener review