by Adam Sisman
Though Tessa is dead before the action of the book starts, she is a vivid presence throughout, both in flashback and in Justin’s interior dialogue with her. She becomes his conscience, and he takes up her cause. In the end he sacrifices himself, as the ultimate individual act of defiance against corporate power.
David had been in touch with Yvette Pierpaoli before leaving for Kenya. In a faxed letter he informed her that his next book would have an African setting, and told her teasingly that his heroine would be somebody as impossible as herself. As he would later acknowledge, it was Yvette’s work that he wished to celebrate when he embarked on the novel. Though Tessa differs from Yvette Pierpaoli in age, occupation, nationality and birth, ‘her commitment to the poor of Africa, particularly its women, her contempt for protocol, and her unswerving, often maddening determination to have her way stemmed, quite consciously so far as I was concerned, from Yvette’s example’. They planned to meet on his return from Africa. ‘I adore the idea of your new book,’ she wrote to him before he left.11 She was on her way to the mountains of Albania, to help refugees from Kosovo.
He had been in Kenya only a few days when Jane called to say that Yvette was dead. In bad weather the car in which she was travelling had driven over a precipice and fallen several hundred feet. The driver and two other aid workers had been killed in the same accident. David flew back from Kenya for Yvette’s funeral, the most moving that he and Jane had ever attended. Her ashes were buried, with both Christian and Buddhist rites, in the garden of her farmhouse near Uzès. Friends came from America, Cambodia and Thailand to embrace one another in the afternoon sunlight. The Constant Gardener would be dedicated: ‘For Yvette Pierpaoli / who lived and died giving a damn’.
There was a mystical side to Yvette that had always made David uneasy. After reading a draft of her autobiography he had advised her to tone down her insistence that she was a child of destiny. Now he found himself confronted with the disconcerting feeling that he had anticipated her death. It was David’s practice to inhabit the character of his secret sharer, in this case the bereaved husband Justin Quayle. For months, therefore, he had been mourning Tessa. But Tessa was a version of Yvette: so he had been mourning Yvette ahead of the fact.
In May 1999 it was announced that Hodder Headline had been sold to the booksellers W. H. Smith – ‘this unattractive alliance’, as David described it to Tim Hely Hutchinson; he had always regarded Smiths as ‘a dismal house, an ailing giant, and I have always greatly resented their influence on British publishing – which extended, in the past, as far as dictating book covers. Their banality has been a curse on the industry.’ Though Hely Hutchinson was quick to reassure him that the change was a positive one, David let it be known that he did not want to be published by Hodder again.12 By the following summer, as he put the finishing touches to The Constant Gardener, he had softened his position, though it remained ‘far from certain’ that the book would be offered to Hodder exclusively. Roland Philipps reported to Hely Hutchinson on a lunch with Bruce Hunter: David had been wondering whether his reviews might not improve if he were with a ‘more literary’ publishing house, among writers of similar stature. In fact, wrote Philipps, his recent British reviews had been ‘superb’, though, as he noted, ‘David only remembers the dispraise.’13
In the event David decided to stay with Hodder, not least because he valued the ‘sure touches of reassurance and discreet counsel’ that his editor provided. The urge to move to a ‘more literary’ publisher was restrained by David’s sense of being a literary loner. ‘On the whole I’ve avoided the company of my fellow English writers,’ he told the literary editor of the Observer, Robert McCrum: ‘I just feel completely out of step with the English literary scene.’14 Asked by another interviewer to comment on ‘his relationship with the critical establishment’, he answered pithily: ‘It doesn’t exist.’15
Relationship or no relationship, the British reviews of The Constant Gardener would be generally positive: in the Times Literary Supplement, for example, Sean O’Brien praised the novel as ‘a very impressive piece of work’ and rated it ‘certainly one of John le Carré’s best books’.16 O’Brien observed that the book was ‘fuelled by carefully controlled but immense rage’ – a quality commented upon by other reviewers, such as John Sutherland in the Sunday Times, who wrote that ‘this is old-man le Carré’s angriest work of fiction’.17 In a letter to Philipps, David acknowledged that ‘a bit of rage’ had helped him to write the book quickly.18 Indeed he had at one stage thought of entitling it ‘The Angry Gardener’.
Helped by the positive press, Hodder Headline worked hard to make a success of The Constant Gardener, which was published on both sides of the Atlantic in January 2001; it became a no. 1 bestseller in the UK, remaining thirteen weeks in the top ten. Afterwards, in a letter to the company’s new managing director, Jamie Hodder-Williams, David expressed his appreciation of the whole Hodder team. ‘It’s a new Hodder’s these days, & a far happier one to deal with, and a most impressive array of talent.’19
One place where The Constant Gardener did not sell was Kenya itself. The depiction of a nation riddled with corrupt policemen, officials and politicians was not appreciated by the authorities, who banned the book from sale; it became a joke in Nairobi that, to avoid trouble with the authorities, bookshops stocked it in the gardening section. Kenyans who travelled abroad brought back multiple copies, to circulate among friends and neighbours.
David responded stingingly to criticism from representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, and declined to debate with them.20 ‘As my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed,’ he wrote in his afterword to the novel, ‘I came to realise that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.’ About six months after the book’s publication he received a letter from the recently appointed director of Oxfam, Barbara Stocking, who wanted ‘to make sure you know how helpful The Constant Gardener has been to our “Cut the Cost” campaign to make drugs more accessible to people in developing countries at prices they could afford’. She referred to the recent success in getting pharmaceutical companies to drop their court case against the South African government for manufacturing generic anti-HIV drugs. ‘We are certain that public opinion was influenced by The Constant Gardener,’ she told him. David forwarded a copy of this letter to Roland Philipps. ‘For me better than 6 Bookers and 20 Soapy awards,’ he scribbled in a covering note.21
The American edition of The Constant Gardener sold reasonably well, reaching no. 4 in the New York Times bestseller list; though this was a falling-off from the heady days when four successive le Carré novels had gone to no. 1. The book’s sales reflected a cooler response from the American critics. In the New York Review of Books, the novelist Hilary Mantel (herself English) characterised the novel as ‘a polemic cast in the form of a thriller’. In her view the polemical form created problems:
Reader and writer are brought up time after time against the limitations of the polemical novel. If you choose to deal with such complicated and sensitive topics in the form of fiction, you are creating great difficulties for yourself, given that dramatic tension and the recitation of facts are often incompatible, and the use of characters as the equivalent of newscasters tends to bore and worry the reader … The Constant Gardener, strident, repetitious, and urgent, is less a novel than a cry from the heart … It is a furious, hasty, and at times embarrassing book.
Mantel found Tessa ‘tiresome, given to flitting against the light in flimsy dresses while Justin and the author salivate over her’.22
The New York Times reviewer, the short-story writer Rand Richards Cooper, seemed equally irritated by Tessa; and, like Mantel, he found the polemical nature of the novel problematic. ‘ “The Constant Gardener” makes some ungainly narrative moves,’ he wrote, ‘using whole chapters of police interrogation to establish basic plot points, and dishing out boatloads of documents for us to sort through.’
The effort hints at anothe
r kind of book altogether – namely, investigative journalism – and as we follow Justin’s search for the truth, ‘The Constant Gardener’ feels ever more like an exposé, an angry diatribe against corporate malfeasance, adorned with sentimental descriptions of Tessa and her courageous actions … that fall far below the subtle insights of le Carré at his best.
It’s not that a novelist can’t also enlighten and exhort. But where in Dickens the desire to improve the real world – to weigh in on the subject of debtors’ prisons or child labor in factories – never interfered with creating a supremely inviting fictional world, one senses an impatience in ‘The Constant Gardener’, as if le Carré were chafing in his eagerness to have us admire his heroine as he does, to get us to believe. Taking sides with the angels, his novel unabashedly wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s almost enough to make you long for the old cold war bleakness and ambiguity.23
David was annoyed by the American reviews. He told Philipps that he could ‘never quite accept’ the way the book had been received there, ‘but Jane says I’m unreasonable on the subject & as usual she’s right. In fact, I’m becoming seriously unbalanced about America altogether. But I’m not sure that isn’t the right thing to be.’24
If the Americans longed for le Carré to return to his past, the Europeans greeted The Constant Gardener as a new beginning. As his sales waned in America, they increased in Europe. The novel was a no. 1 bestseller in France, for example, selling more than 400,000 copies. His German publishers sold 50,000 copies in the first week. Spies were almost entirely absent from The Constant Gardener, but European publishers felt little nostalgia for the Circus; they welcomed his engagement with the present. Since the end of the Cold War his books had addressed the realities of the New World Order, tackling big themes one by one. The Constant Gardener represented a further step towards the polemic. Gone was the moral ambiguousness of the Smiley novels, or even of The Little Drummer Girl. Henceforth there would be a clear line between right and wrong. ‘I can’t write small any more,’ David wrote to Philipps, soon after the publication of The Constant Gardener: ‘Single & Single cd never have followed TCG – it had to be the other way round.’25
No doubt there were complex cultural reasons why The Constant Gardener should have appealed more to European readers than to Americans; but it may also have been due to the fact that it was published with extra energy and enthusiasm. In 2000 he had asked David Higham Associates to begin handling his foreign rights as well as his English-language rights. Bruce Hunter and his colleague Ania Corless instigated a systematic review of David’s publishing throughout the world. They found some surprising gaps: territories where some books had been sold and not others; territories where rights had technically lapsed and been neither renewed nor terminated; and a few territories which seemed to have been forgotten altogether. In others the existing publisher had become complacent, suggesting that a change might benefit David. Corless set about tackling the territories one by one, considering which publisher might do the best job and setting up a new publishing programme, reverting rights where necessary, and often negotiating improved royalty rates. Some publishers offered to issue his collected works in a uniform edition. As a somewhat different sort of book from its predecessors, The Constant Gardener provided an opportunity to find new publishers for David. In at least one commercially significant territory, the existing publisher stated that it was not a novel that they could sell in large quantities, so Corless sold it instead to one who was more bullish. Among several new arrangements entered into, none was more rewarding than in Germany, the country closest to David’s heart and his most lucrative market outside the English-speaking world. Corless moved him to Ullstein, one of Germany’s largest publishing companies.
An advance copy of The Constant Gardener had found its way to Simon Channing Williams, who only months before had established an independent production company, Potboiler Productions. Best known for his longstanding collaboration with Mike Leigh, the genial and generous-spirited Channing Williams had a reputation as an unflappable, ‘can do’ producer. On reading the novel, he was so taken with it that he faxed an impassioned letter to David’s lawyer, Michael Rudell, pleading his case for being given the chance to turn it into a film. To demonstrate his seriousness he volunteered to fly from London to New York that same evening to meet Rudell. ‘It was such a heartfelt, angry book,’ he said later, ‘and at the root of it all, an utterly compelling love story’ – told unusually from the male point of view.
Channing Williams’s enthusiasm convinced David and his advisers to entrust the project to him. To write the screenplay he proposed Jeffrey Caine, a television veteran whose credits included the 1995 James Bond film Golden Eye – subject to David’s approval, which he gave after meeting Caine for lunch. As an admirer of his novels, Caine welcomed David’s input into the writing, his presence at script meetings and the notes he provided on Caine’s various drafts, during the two years that the film was in development. It was obvious that changes would be needed to make the story work on the screen; in fact, David urged Caine to make more. One came at the end: the last chapter of the novel, a report of what happened after Justin’s death, is dramatised in the film as a memorial service, at which the duplicitous Sir Bernard Pellegrin is unmasked.
The first choice to direct the film was Mike Newell, who had made the enormously successful Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); but he withdrew when offered the opportunity to direct the fourth Harry Potter film. Channing Williams then recruited Fernando Meirelles, whose 2002 film City of God had won awards around the globe. Having witnessed the struggle to make generic drugs available in his native Brazil, Meirelles was strongly in sympathy with the book. The two men made a ‘recce’ together to the original locations in Kenya and agreed that they should film there if possible. A new government had been elected in 2003, offering the possibility that the anticipated difficulties might be overcome. The British High Commissioner, Sir Edward Clay, made no secret of the fact that he had been ‘outraged’ by the novel’s ‘hostile caricature of British diplomats’; but he overcame his resistance, in the interests of Kenya itself and of the wider causes espoused by the novel. Clay and his staff provided much practical help and advice, including introductions to Kenyan ministers that proved crucial in obtaining the necessary consents.
City of God had won worldwide acclaim for its convincing portrayal of organised crime in the slums of Rio de Janeiro; Meirelles had cast amateur actors from similar backgrounds to those of the violent young gang members they were playing, and filmed in the deprived neighbourhoods where they lived. For The Constant Gardener, Meirelles aimed to achieve a similar level of authenticity, by shooting as much of the film as possible in the real locations where the story was set, using local people as extras. Some of the most startling footage was shot in the shanty town of Kibera, a suburb of Nairobi, the most populous slum in Africa, where up to one million people lived in squalid huts, without access to clean water, sanitation or mains electricity. Members of the cast and crew were so affected by what they had seen that afterwards they set up a charity to improve living conditions for people in the areas where filming had taken place. Its patrons were David himself, Meirelles and the film’s co-stars, Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. The Constant Gardener Trust has since supported many projects, providing freshwater tanks, shower blocks and toilets in Kibera, building a bridge there to allow easier access to the local health clinic, and funding a much needed secondary school in Loiyangalani, a small town on the banks of Lake Turkana which served as a base for the crew while they were filming in the area.
The sense of authenticity was accentuated by Meirelles’s extensive use of a hand-held camera, making the drama feel like a documentary. His naturalistic directing style allowed his actors exceptional scope to improvise, so that the dialogue became theirs as much as Caine’s or David’s. ‘There’s hardly a line left, hardly a scene intact that comes from my novel,’ David has said. ‘Yet I don’t know of a better t
ranslation from novel to film.’ Even Caine found himself improvising, in his cameo role as a porter at Sir Bernard’s club.
The Constant Gardener was a critical and commercial success, winning many awards, including Oscars for Jeffrey Caine and Rachel Weisz, a Golden Globe for Weisz, and a BAFTA for the editor, Claire Simpson.
In the foreword to a new edition of The Tailor of Panama, published in April 2001, David inveighed against ‘the long, dishonourable history of United States colonialism in the region’. He took the opportunity to attack current American foreign policy, especially the failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change. ‘The new American realism, which is nothing other than gross corporate power cloaked in demagogy, means one thing only: that America will put America first in everything,’ he wrote. ‘Quite simply and emphatically, I do not believe that the United States is fit to run the post-Cold War world, and I think the sooner Britain and Europe wake up to that fact, the better.’ David expressed contempt for the newly elected President of the United States (son of the George Bush who had sent him a letter of praise for The Night Manager). ‘I happen also to believe that George W. Bush is not fit to run America, or for that matter a single-decker bus, but that’s America’s business. Unfortunately, he has been given charge of the world’s only superpower.’26