''I'm an Oswald man,'' he says, making a case for ''accepting the obvious.'' But when someone breaks Office dismisses the idea of a conspiracy behind Tessa's death. Justin begins to look into Tessa's work, particularly her inquiries into a new antituberculosis drug, Dypraxa, rushed to market despite serious side effects - with Africans serving as medical guinea pigs.

Of a vehicle trailing the one Tessa died in, or a pair of rough-looking men seen at a nearby lodge the previous night? Has a soul-mate friend, a Belgian-African doctor named Arnold Bluhm and when she turns up dead, and Bluhm vanishes, Justin at first bows to the notion of an affair gone terribly awry. Is a society girl turned Oxbridge-trained lawyer and zealous missionary to the poor - Mother Teresa of the Nairobi Slums,'' one newspaper calls her, the ''Angel Who Gave a Damn.'' Tessa His much younger wife, Tessa, on the other hand, No ambition beyond tending his flower garden, and little use of his intellect beyond fashioning sophistical diplomatic arguments for inaction in the face of injustice. The gardener of the title is Justin Quayle, an officer at the British High Commission and one of those supremely English characters who embrace being a cog in the machinery of government with a fanatical resignation. It takes us to an Africa that has fallen off the West's map, and to a rueful coterie of Brits idling away in ''dangerous,ĭecaying, plundered'' Kenya, where grave-digging thieves steal wedding rings off the corpses of the wealthy, and a ''safe haven'' isn't a shelter for spies but rather your bedroom,Ĭlosed off from below by a steel security door.

And so ''TheĬonstant Gardener,'' le Carré's 18th novel, looks like a departure.

Charting the breakup of the Soviet Union (''Our Game''), reporting on arms merchants (''The Night Manager'')Īnd money-laundering drug kingpins (''Single & Single''), the master of the spy thriller has matched pace with the headlines, keeping us apprised of our next new enemy. Mericans have spent the first post-cold-war decade peering through the mists of our new isolationism and wondering whom to worry about out there.įew have been more ready with suggestions than John le Carré. Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'The Constant Gardener' (Dec.In a Plot Far From the Cold, Le Carré Sums Up the Past (Dec.A minor British functionary in Kenya, the hero of John le Carré's novel is spurred to action after his wife is murdered.

Le carre the constant gardener