In the heart of England there is a closed world, and you enter it only through the door marked Pull: you cannot push your way into it however rich and powerful you may make yourself. Born into it, you proceed through private school, public school, the universities---There are only two, and only certain of their colleges matter---where you study classical or modern languages, thence to France, or Germany, or Switzerland, or some combination of all three, to gain a measure of cosmopolitan finish; and at last you enter into the public service, the public service, because you are not expecting to make yourself rich: you are sufficiently rich already, or will become rich by inheritance, which is the only decent way to acquire riches. Because you have never had to struggle, never had to compete with the rest of us, you are socially graceful. Because your education has allowed you to fulfil every atom of your intellectual potential you are clever though perhaps not intellectual, and because your formative years were spent mostly in boarding schools in the company of other boys and of pederasts, you have unrealistic ideas about women. You are patriotic and paternalistic, you are loyal to the members of your class, the class of British administrators. You are also fitted to be a major participant in a novel by John le Carré.
Your world cherishes its enclosure: things acquire nicknames that baffle the outsider. The point is that you have to be a member of the club: outsiders are exactly that, outsiders. So le Carré's world is a world of baby-sitters and pavement-artists, who in other worlds would be referred to as personal-protection-officers, and undercover-surveillance-operatives. The nicknames carry with them the sense of amateur insouciance that used to be a facet of character, as valued by the administrative class as skilful understatement. The character, as instilled by the standard education and training is moral but devious. A member of this class will not lie to you, but, instead he will tell you the truth so misleadingly that he will not need to lie.
As a representative of the British Government abroad, a member of the class may be presented with a dilemma. Many foreign governments that the British Government finds mercenary value in dealing with are oppressive and corrupt. Fostering international trade with such governments can present moral problems for even the most pliant of diplomats; and diplomats seeking to retain a sense of moral cleanness have to engage in ethical contortions that would confound a casuist in order to justify flattering tyrants in exchange for trade.
In Kenya, in the bush, the bodies of Tessa Quayle and the driver of her landrover, are found; they have both been brutally murdered. Tessa Quayle's travelling companion, Dr Arnold Bluhm, has disappeared without trace. Tessa Quayle's husband, a middle-ranking diplomat, based in Nairobi, a member of the administrative class, tries to find out why his beautiful, radical wife was murdered. The wives of members of the administrative class do not work for money: those who have a sense of social responsibility work voluntarily for charities. Tessa had been active in aid-giving and providing medical services to the poorest of poor people in Nairobi; having seen what she has had to see has caused her to become politically radical, and her radicalism leads to conflict with the the policy of the British Government which is to conduct diplomatic relations harmoniously with the corrupt and oppressive government of Kenya for the sake of trade. This conflict is circumvented domestically by husband and wife who both keep parts of their lives completely private. In this way Quayle's standing with the diplomatic corps is unaffected by his wife's potentially embarrassing behaviour. Though tensions are unavoidable, the couple live happily and trustingly together; but after Tessa's murder, Quayle is left in complete ignorance of possible motives for her killing. The official story is that Dr Arnold Bluhm (who is black) raped her out of uncontrollable lust, then murdered her, and killed the driver too to delay detection of the crime, before escaping and lying low in the bush. The explanation does not convince Quayle who knew Bluhm personally. As he tries to find out more he is frustrated by the British Government which does not want inconvenient discoveries to frustrate its trade agreements with the government of Kenya; he comes up against big business which does not want too much scrutiny of its flexible attitudes to trading in the third world; and he irritates members of the government of Kenya who do not want stones overturned lest the scale of corruption be revealed to the public. Quayle, though, is not put off. Independently rich, and with a network of trustworthy friends of his own class, he seeks answers, converting the predators into potential prey. The predators respond by seeking to remove the threat posed by Quayle and pursue him as he seeks out the truth.
The book is far more than a chase-thriller. Tessa Quayle is angry about the corruption in Kenya, corruption fostered by the trading partners overseas. She is angry about the irresponsibility of big business intent only in maximizing profits from Kenya. She is angry about the power of multi-national companies to dictate the foreign policy of even the most powerful countries in the world.
This is the first of Le Carré's books to take a moral stance, and the book is all the better for this. Quayle, himself, confirms that his wife was not killed by the lust-maddened Arnold Bluhm, and he becomes certain that those threatened by her ethical integrity have caused Tessa's murder or are at the least complaisant in it. In his search for the evidence he travels to Canada, to Germany, to the island of Elba, and back to Kenya where the search comes to its ineluctable conclusion.
One of the bleakest aspects of Le Carré's Cold War novels is the complete absence of any sense of ethical commitment. For his characters, spying in the Cold War was motivated by patriotism, which is expressed through the desire to keep England as it used to be, implicitly, as it used to be for members of the administrative class; and indeed there was no detectable moral superiority to be discerned in any one of the contesting factions so convincingly depicted. In The constant gardener Le Carré applies all the skills we recognize from the Cold War novels: evocative descriptions of place, incisive representations of character through interaction and conversation, thrilling action thrillingly described, with, for the first time, the addition of a polemically argued ethical dimension which makes the novel his best so far.
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