Snakes in the Grass

Beautiful, young, wealthy, well-educated, Tessa Quayle is a crusader, the selflessly dedicated defender of those who cannot defend themselves, “that rarest thing: a lawyer who believes in justice.” She is also an infuriating zealot, a royal nuisance, a pain in the neck of the vested interests that she assails in her heedless campaigns against iniquity, insensitivity and malfeasance. Tessa is horribly murdered in the opening pages of John le Carre’s latest [im]morality tale. But her voluble ghost hovers, to inspire the actions and reactions of a long, moving, understated tribute to conscientious dissent that unfolds to present a fine patchwork quilt.

Justin Quayle, the widower whom Tessa leaves behind, is a mid-level foreign service official in the office of the British High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya, where Tessa kept busy helping the poor and needy and where Justin kept his distance from her enthusiasms and from the surrounding horrors. Like many diplomats (but not diplomats only), Justin has learned to walk past life with lowered eyes. Member of a profession in which studied ignorance is an art form and evasion a craft, he regards idealism with skepticism and strongly held convictions as delusions and snares. The human race, he thinks, is naturally nuts or worse. All that his kind like can hope for is to try to head it off from its worst excesses.

Tessa and Justin had loved each other deeply, but each in his and her own way. She followed her conscience; he got on with his job. She pursued importunate passions; he gardened: an enterprise in which reasoned efforts had a better chance of paying off. But even this minimalist approach does not save Justin from contamination. The world impinges; so does the muted challenge of Tessa’s death. Kenya is a squalid, corrupt, criminal mess ruled by foul kleptocrats who feed on helpless prey. Tessa’s murder and the disappearance of her co-conspirator in the cause of the oppressed force the gardener to raise his eyes from the flower beds.

His masters in Whitehall and Nairobi want to sweep an embarrassing episode under the carpet. The press is interested only in the sensationally superficial aspects of his wife’s doings. His colleagues, in the carapace of convention and self-regard that he has just cast off, are less help than hindrance. All regard truth as irrelevant, inaccessible or inexpedient. But Justin is honorable, wealthy and determined. He knows that he has failed his love and means to make up for it. Impregnable in his armor of grief and good manners, the bereaved gardener will press ahead in his quest for the agents and agencies of his wife’s death.

It turns out that Tessa’s last crusade concerned both the blight of tuberculosis lately resurfacing in Africa as a plague resistant to traditional medications and a wonder drug, Dyspraxa. Its makers (the Swiss-Canadian pharma-giant Karel Vita Hudson and its distributors (Bell, Barker and Benjamin, otherwise known as the ThreeBees) are described and self-described as “busy for Africa” and “buzzing for Africa” with a “finger in every Africa pie but British to the core.” Cheap and innovative, Dyspraxa is said to be good for humanity (the sort of claim that made Tessa vomit). It is good for Africa and for the shareholders of those who make and market it. It is less good for Africans to whom it is administered, who rot and die like flies, their sufferings hidden from authorities and from media that are in cahoots with giant corporate interests bent on concealing the shortcomings of a miracle drug that has not been fully tested.

Pharmaceutical firms and their cats-paws are using poor Africans as guinea pigs; the side effects of Dyspraxa are concealed in the interest of profit; legitimate scientific debate is stifled by corporate intimidation and, if need be, by crime. Determined to denounce murderous machinations camouflaged as humanitarian claims, Tessa had to be eliminated, her documentation erased, her revelations choked off. And so they would have been had Justin not winkled out what Karel Vita Hudson and the ThreeBees sought to conceal.

Determined to make amends for the privileged indifference of yesteryear, he will pursue Tessa’s pharma-criminal quarries through England, Italy, Canada, Sudan and back to Kenya, where he flutters unaccountable dovecotes and forces people to take notice of amoral monopolies that shed lives like petals. He also interviews witnesses who contribute lectures on international humanitarians with tax-free salaries, pensions and expense accounts and on pharma-conspirators who sell their wares at outrageous prices, donate useless stocks to poor starving nations and collect tax breaks in return.

Unfortunately, as Justin barges on (and his progress, though slow, is absorbing), the story’s focus gets more diffuse, responsibility becomes less specific and more depersonalized. As in other Le Carre disquisitions, the good are flummoxed, the flawed survive, the powers that be ride out their problems, and Justin proves as dispensable as Tessa had been. Though not before his creator has delivered his message about global capitalists with politicians, diplomats, scientists, cops and the media in their pockets; a message easier to swallow because the fabulist writes so well.

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Because he writes elegantly and because his characters engage us, we do not stop to wonder how well Le Carre’s discourse holds up. Though sentimentally hard to resist, hostility to authority is not always a virtue, and the superior righteousness of the oppressed remains, as the Scots say, unproven. Who knows? Relentless pursuit of exploiters may satisfy private ire more than the public good. The human race has put up with humans for a long time; it can probably put up with pharmaceutical giants too. Besides, it’s all a fiction. Or perhaps it isn’t.

Coincidentally, not long before “The Constant Gardener” rushed into print to feed our artless pleasure, an Englishman named Edward Hooper, who once worked for the United Nations and for the BBC in Africa, wrote a true scientific detective story called “The River,” fruit of 10 years’ research into the source of HIV and AIDS. In 858 pages of text and 73 pages of notes, “The River” suggests that the AIDS epidemic may have started in the 1950s, when simian immunodeficiency virus was transferred from apes (who had long lived with it) to humans by American and European administration of an experimental oral polio vaccine manufactured from the kidneys of chimpanzees. The medical accident was compounded by efforts to conceal evidence of the contretemps, its causes and its fallout, not least by “the continued reluctance of the medical and scientific communities to properly investigate the hypothesis that their activities may have inadvertently given birth to the most devastating infectious disease in human history.”

In his strongly stated foreword to Hooper’s disturbing book, Bill Hamilton, the Royal Society professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford, speaks of dictators and businessmen who want to hide the results of unsuccessful or disastrous experiments, of an immensely wealthy international industry eager to quash scientific inquiry leading in directions counter to their interests and of litigation being used to suppress publication of discussions as it was used as a threat to Hooper himself. What’s happening to freedom of discussion, Hamilton asks, to freedom of publication, let alone to the spirit of science, when unwelcome criticism is met by a wall of silence and/or a host of discouraging lawsuits?

He might well ask. Or he might point to “The Constant Gardener” for hints of an answer.