Cynical Thrillers

First, another riff on the optimist/pessimist analogy:  When John Le Carre looks at a glass, he wonders what powerful entity, government or corporate, controls the glass.  He wonders if taking a drink will kill him.  He wonders if the glass has been placed there as a provocation or a warning.

The Constant Gardener, published in 2001, is set in Kenya, and revolves around the British Foreign Office, Big Pharma, and various aid agencies.  As the action commences, Justin Quayle, a mild-mannered chap in the FO, learns that his young, beautiful, and passionate wife, Tessa has been brutally murdered.  Questions soon arise.  What was she doing in the dangerous wilds?  What was she doing with that handsome African doctor?  Was her killing simply random violence, a jealous attack, or politically motivated?

Le Carre tells the story slowly, building the evidence in a quiet, almost offhand manner.  He moves smoothly from one character’s point of view to another’s.  We see Sandy Woodrow was wildly infatuated with Tessa, and had sent her a letter offering to run away with her.  Woodrow is also wildly ambitious, longing to take the place of the kindly but ineffectual High Commissioner, one more step on his way to a knighthood.  Do his ambitions mask some of his baser motives?

Soon a couple of gigantic corporations loom into view: a company known as the Three Bees, and a pharmaceutical company with the Soviet-sounding initials KVH.  As he researches his wife’s death, Justin learns that these companies were essentially using Africa as a test laboratory for a TB drug known as Dypraxa.  Among the side effects are such minor concerns as blindness and death–that is, they are minor because they are happening to poor Africans and not rich westerners.  Tessa and her African doctor friend (who, it turns out, was a homosexual and thus not her lover, though the rumors persist and grow) were on a campaign on behalf of African aid agencies to make the companies accountable for their misdeeds.

The action in the novel moves slowly and methodically.  As Justin accumulates evidence, we learn more and more about the almost mad characters behind the scenes at the Big Pharma corporations, where megalomania and a thirst for absolute power seem to be the norm.  One medical researcher found her career destroyed for daring to question the Pharma protocols.  She got off easy.  Justin begins to realize that there is no way he can fight these companies–they have immense wealth and power, and their corporate interests are made to coincide with British diplomatic and economic interests.  Thus, the Foreign Office has no desire to investigate, and Scotland Yard fires the only two officers wh seem to be at all interested in learning the truth.

Le Carre’s novels often display the hopelessness of individuals trying to work within or without a system that cares little for the individual.  The huge, powerful concerns, governments or corporations, have been warped by their size and power to the point that size and power are no longer adjuncts to their being but are the only reason for being.  In The Looking Glass War, the games played by intelligence services became more important than the value or meaning of the intelligence.  In The Constant Gardener, the human characters either sell their souls to play nicely with their overlords, or they perish in their resistance.