The Constant Gardener" may be the angriest story Le Carre has ever told. Certainly his elegant prose and the oblique shorthand of the dialogue shows the writer forcing himself to turn fury into style. His novel involves drug companies who test their products on the poor of the Third World and are willing to accept the deaths that may occur because, after all, those people don't count. Why not? Because no one is there to count them. In short, just another bloody Monday in late January, the hottest time in the Nairobi year, a time of dust and water shortages and brown grass and sore eyes and heat ripping off the city pavements; and the jacarandas, like everybody else, waiting for the long rains. Issue one: the side effects are being deliberately concealed in the interest of profit. Issue two: the world's poorest communities are used as guinea pigs by the world's richest. Issue three: legitimate scientific debate of these issues is stifled by corporate intimidation.”

For a moment of paralysis Woodrow had no further questions, or perhaps he had too many. I’m in prison already, he thought. My life sentence started five minutes ago. He passed a hand across his eyes and when he removed it he saw Donohue and Sheila watching him with the same blank expressions they had worn when he told them she was dead. Sandy. Greetings. What can we do you for?” he cried, peering down on Woodrow through his bifocals and grinning his skull’s grin. After Tessa's burial, Justin learns from his colleague Ghita that Tessa kept Arnold's secret that he was gay, as homosexuality is illegal in Kenya. Pursuing the truth about his wife's murder, Justin follows the trail of her report. He is briefly detained by police and confronts Three Bees' CEO Kenny Curtis, but receives no answers. He came in early. It’s what he does when Tessa’s on a field trip. Do you want me to cancel the meeting?” Take a minor duo here, the police pair Rob and Lesley. They are brilliantly drawn - fragments of working-class le Carré gophers of old reassembled for the postmodern world. The same is true of the High Commission spook Donohue, with his bloodhound face, radio dials and knowledge of everything before it happens. Donohue's golf-playing, mutually parasitical relationship with Kenny "K" Curtiss, the Maxwell-like entrepreneur whose shady ThreeBees outfit sells the bad pills for the Swiss in Africa, is very effectively rendered. It is also instructive. Is this the way le Carré will go now, laying bare the provisionality of relationships between states and multinationals and those who work for them, as before he dealt with the fate of individuals caught up in cold-war contingencies and the decline of post-imperial Britain?Ebert, Roger (1 September 2005). "The Constant Gardener review". Chicago Sun-Times . Retrieved 11 November 2017.

We’re fine.” A delay, of Woodrow’s manufacture. “And Tessa is up-country,” he suggested. He was giving her one last chance to prove it was all a dreadful mistake.

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Tessa’s fight brought her in conflict with a pharma giant, and guess what – the corrupt Kenyan government and the British government were not only mute spectators to this crime, but in collusion with ensuring that the affair did not come to light. It becomes apparent that British officials investigating Tessa’s death are working in cooperation with ThreeBees. Tessa and Bluhm have been killed by hired gunmen at the instruction of ThreeBees because of their ongoing investigation which would have outed the pharmaceutical company as being irresponsible and unethical. Woodrow struggled to get his words together. “The police say Noah was decapitated. Is that right? Over.” They knew, Woodrow told himself in fury as he returned downstairs. They knew before I did that she was dead. But that’s what they want you to believe: we spies know more about everything than you do, and sooner. The Constant Gardener was such a good book! Without knowing much about it, I was very intrigued about this thriller. In it, we will meet Tessa and Justin. She was a humanitarian and he was a British diplomat. They also used to be married until her untimely death.

She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction. It should never have been made. It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us. It was like drawing a chalk line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed.” Tessa Quayle was a diplomat’s wife on a social justice mission, who struggled to be taken seriously by the proper authorities. She was a slight annoyance to her husband’s colleagues at the High Commission in Nairobi… until she is found, murdered by Lake Turkana, her driver decapitated and her confidant (and supposed lover) missing. Justin Quayle might have seemed like a placid man and a bit of a cold fish, but he is anything but: he will stop at nothing to find out who killed his wife and why, and in the process, will uncover a far-reaching conspiracy that he could not have even imagined. All right,” he said aggressively to Mildren, having first closed the door behind him and dropped the latch. Dark hair, no makeup, tall, late twenties, not British. Not for me. South German, Austrian or Italian. I’m a hotelier. I look at people. And beautiful. I’m a man too. Sexy like an animal, how she moves. And clothes like you could blow them off. That sound like your Abbott or somebody else’s? Over.” And a chum of Tessa’s, obviously.” Ghita’s dark eyes made no comment. “Do you know other people at Bluhm’s outfit?”Whose car?” Woodrow demanded wildly—fighting now, rejecting the whole mad concept—who, how, where and his other thoughts and senses forced down, down, down, and all his secret memories of her furiously edited out, to be replaced by the baked moonscape of Turkana as he recalled it from a field trip six months ago in the unimpeachable company of the military attaché. “Stay where you are, I’m coming up. And don’t talk to anyone else, d’you hear?” I mean, Jesus. Foreign Office isn't in the business of passing judgment on the safety of nonindigenous drugs, is it? Supposed to be greasing the wheels of British industry, not going round telling everybody that a British company in Africa is poisoning its customers. You know the game. We're not paid to be bleeding hearts. We're not killing people who wouldn't otherwise die. I mean, Christ, look at the death rate in this place. Not that anybody's counting.” I thought she might have used one of the aid agencies’ radio links. Isn’t that what other people do?” Well, try.” A question occurred to him. In all the months he had known Tessa, it had never presented itself till now. “Is Bluhm married, d’you know?”

In August of 2005, Focus Features released a film adaptation of The Constant Gardener directed by Fernando Meirelles, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. [3] Weisz won the Oscar, Golden Globe, and SAG Awards for her performance as Tessa.Screenwriter Jeffrey Caine was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film also received ten BAFTA nominations including Best Film, winning one for Best Editing. Meirelles, Fiennes, Weisz, and Caine were each nominated here as well. Justin had always stayed out of the activist part of Tessa's life. And she had always protected him and his diplomatic career from it. This all changes when Tessa is murdered, and Justin is overwhelmed by a tragic loss. He feels the necessity of unraveling the reasons and the people involved in his wife's death, learning things he never knew about her when she was alive, globetrotting as a pseudo-spy. What he uncovers is nothing less than the dark side of global capitalism. It turns out that diffidence can be a powerful attribute when you are surrounded by scoundrels. At first Justin simply hides out in the house of one such, the very same Sandy. A slug of a man who used to ogle the beautiful Tessa, Sandy even sent her a love note in a moment of weakness. Now his own wife Gloria has taken a fancy to the grieving adult schoolboy (for so Justin initially seems) hiding in their guest suite: "What are you doing down there? she wondered. Are you lying on your bed flailing yourself in the darkness? Or are you staring through your bars into the garden, talking to her ghost?" Justin Quayle, a British diplomat and avid horticulturalist, is confronted by Amnesty International activist Tessa during a lecture in London. They strike up a romance, and marry after she accompanies him to his posting in Kenya, where she befriends Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, leading to rumors of an affair. Tessa has no qualms confronting corruption, to the chagrin of Justin's superiors, and they lose a child late in her pregnancy.I had expected a rather light & frothy thriller and instead I got a serious examination of big pharma—its use of the unfortunate as test subjects and its desire to put profit well ahead of human kindness. Also explored is the nature of colonialism in Kenya, reminding me a bit of The Poisonwood Bible. Heavy subjects for a popular novel! No, I don’t. I keep clear of him. I don’t like film stars in the aid business. Where the hell did he go? Where is he?” Now a major motion picture from Fernando Meirelles, the Academy Award-nominated director of City of God