Review: The Constant Gardener

The Constant Gardener by John le Carré
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I gathered from reputation that this is supposed to John le Carre’s late career masterpiece. As much as I admire his work, I think it falls short of what I was hoping for.

That said, even second-tier le Carre has its virtues. Here we have the powerful element of Justin, a bereaved husband, trying to unravel the mystery of why Tessa was murdered. The answer, as we come to see in its broadest outlines almost from the start, has to do with big pharmaceutical and its potential for billion-dollar paydays.

Tessa herself may be the most remarkable character in the novel. She is, in many ways, too good for this world. She’s beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy, but she determines to help ‘the wretched of the earth’ by exposing the lax drug trials these multinationals are doing before dispensing their drugs.

That too-good-to-be-true quality works because, since the death of their child, the couple has drifted apart. Justin has taken comfort in his hobbies – in particular his gardening – spending his grief by working to bring something like new life into the world. Tessa, meanwhile, has embarked on her virtuous project and experienced multiple affairs.

As Justin undertakes his detective work, he falls in love with her all over again. There’s an ache in the process, and there were some early parts that made me think of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair where passion flares after it’s too late.

The early promise of the novel fades for me, though, for two reasons.

First, this becomes more of a procedural than I’d have liked. Justin goes from place to place, assembling clues and talking to people in the know, but he doesn’t seem to grow emotionally beyond that early, arresting portrait. When I think of first-rate le Carre – of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Smiley’s People – I think about the way he asks human beings to carry the emotional weight of the cold war, the emotional weight of a nation’s clandestine misdeeds. Here, though, we rarely get a sense of the wrenching minefield of the experience. We have a flawed, weak man pursuing the work of his flawed, strong wife, but I don’t remember him gaining fresh insight to go with his outrage.

Second, even the procedural quality of this leaves me wanting. I read the even more recently published A Legacy of Spies a year or so ago, and – while I liked it more than this – it troubled me that so much of the ‘adventure’ consisted of that Smiley person, Peter Guillam, reviewing long-sealed records and coming to fresh insights.

I’m a researcher. I’ve spent time in physical and on-line archives, and I know the thrill of discovering some ingot of information buried in a file open to anyone but rarely examined carefully. I love doing it. But I don’t know that I love reading about someone else doing it.

So, as beautiful as this almost is for a stretch, I found myself wanting more urgency both in what is what at stake for Justin and in the way he goes about trying to solve the mystery.

Credit to le Carre for the same soaring moral imagination as always – and acknowledgement that I put this down midway and then picked it up again – but this one doesn’t quite combine that with the page-turner skill of his strongest work.


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