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Loading... The Constant Gardener: A Novelby John le Carre
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  r1hard | Nov 22, 2009 |  Justin Quayle, foreign officer who seems more interested in his garden than anything (although this is hinted at more than shown), finds new depths after his wife is murdered. She had been exposing the sins of a phamaceutical company that was pushing its new tuberculosis drug in Africa, despite numerous problems. We see Justin mourning Tessa. Moments when she seems to be with him and he speaks to her are particularly nicely handled. Eventually he is energized and begins to track down the people involved in the case she was pursuing. The first two thirds of this long novel drag pretty badly. I kept reading because of the author's reputation and curiosity to see how he would handle certain aspects of the story. His style is competent and excellent in places, but he spends more time in the private thoughts of several characters than I thought necessary. A good book but too long and slow for me to recommend it with any enthusiasm. (  )1  Jim53 | Apr 27, 2009 | Le Carre is clearly getting very angry. Perfect read, gruesome story, so much reality, hard to bear. allsun | Dec 7, 2008 | John le Carré is incapable of writing a bad sentence, and frequently writes good ones. This gives him a major head start on the pack and always has. Yes, he writes thrillers, but they are highbrow thrillers which attempt to do more than while away a few hours in the airport lounge. This book took me a fortnight to read, which is unusual for me. It is not a page-turner. More precisely, I found turning the pages to be a good idea, but not absolutely essential. The highlight for me was the masterful way in which grief was explored: Justin for his murdered Tessa. The lowlight was the over-elaborate way the plot was spun out with what the author considered to be subtle nuances of characterisation and colour; some worked, others got on my nerves. Particularly irritating - because incomprehensible - was the cagey way Justin responded to the police, as though he didn't want Tessa's murderers found. This labouring of tension - taking secrecy and subterfuge to the limit and then slightly beyond - is a gripe I've had with several other of his works as well. But the ending was very fine, and the book is staying in my memory warts and all. ( ) Karen_Wells | Aug 25, 2008 | Struggled to get through this. (  ) kwyles | Aug 24, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0743215052, Hardcover)British diplomat Justin Quayle, complacent raiser of freesias and doting husband of the stunning, much younger Tessa, has tended his own garden in Nairobi too long. Tessa is Justin's opposite, a fiery reformer, "that rarest thing, a lawyer who believes in justice," whose campaigns have earned her a nickname: "the Princess Diana of the African poor." But now Tessa has turned up naked, raped, and dead on a mysterious visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. Her traveling companion (and lover?), the handsome Congolese-Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, has vanished. So has Quayle's complacency.Tessa had been compiling data against a multinational drug company that uses helpless Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with unfortunately fatal side effects. Her report was destroyed by her husband's superiors; was she? It's all somehow connected to the sinister British firm House of ThreeBees, whose ad boasts that it's "buzzy for the health of Africa!" John le Carré symbolically associates ThreeBees with an ominous buzz in the Nairobi morgue: "Over [the corpses], in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note." The home office tries to take Quayle in out of the cold. He cleverly eludes their clammy embrace, turns spy, and takes off on a global chase to avenge Tessa and solve her murder. Le Carré has lost none of his gift for setting vivid scenes in far-flung places expertly described: London, Germany, Saskatchewan, Kenya. His sprinting thriller prose remains in great shape. And thanks to his 16 years in the British Foreign Office, his merciless send-up of its cutthroat intrigues and petty self-delusions is unbelievably good--or rather, believably so. This is global do-gooder satire on a literary par with Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark. But you want to know if The Constant Gardener is as good as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Very nearly. Africa's nightmare is more complex than the cold war chess match, and the world pharmaceutical circus is tougher to dramatize than the old spy-versus-spy-versus-spymaster game. Still, le Carré can write a smart, melancholy page-turner, and his moral outrage (the real subject of his books) burns as brightly as ever. --Tim Appelo (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
Nachdem ich das Buch beiseite gelegt hatte, habe ich mir den Film dazu angesehen und wurde noch mehr enttäuscht, denn der Film lässt noch mehr Fragen offen als das Buch.