Chapter Justin in Canada, slides into impersonal with Lara, pp — powerful description of cold and bleakness contrasts with Africa and again the big city of London, and again Netherlands. Chapter Lara and Justine, pp large print, Chs , pp. Chapter Donahue, disillusioned idealist-spy; in terms of plot ends on scene between Donohue and Cricks after Curtiss has bullied and ranted and we see Crick was murderer and wants out.
LeCarre doing a balancing act between subjective fiction and action-adventure where what comes next and who-did-it are central to readers. Why do we suspect that Douglas Crick was the head of the gang of thugs that murdered and raped Tessa and tortured and murdered Arnold.
The resume, p in my edition, and his attempt to get Donahue to hire him. Final chapters, epilogue we are back to Justin: is he mad; he begins to see her there as a ghost beckoning him, and the book takes on paradigm of ghost story.
Very powerful. Evil, guilt, and justice. It is a love story too. Powerful close, in the film Fiennes brilliant, really haunted p. New alternation: Chapter Woodrow and Justin,. This is effective because they are two contrasting points of view about life itself. Literature not meant to be mysterious, complexity is not mystery. Chapters impersonal narrator interwoven with Justin. Women make the homes, men just make wars… and hooch.
Tell that to your readers, Mr. Black, Chapter 23, beginning p. Justin has lost sanity and narrator must intervene now and again as at the beginning of Chapter 25, Justin in death. Final chapter first begins in London where we see no justice is going to be done and then returns to final scene.
Not, of course, the British government. They merely covered up, as one does, the offensive corpses. Though not literally. That was done by person or persons unknown.
So who has committed murder? Not, of course, the highly respectable firm of KDH Pharmaceutical, which has enjoyed record profits this quarter, and has now licensed ZimbaMed of Harare, to continue testing Dypraxa in Africa. No, there are no murders in Africa.
Only regrettable deaths. And from those deaths we derive the benefits of civilization, benefits we can afford so easily… because those lives were bought so cheaply. Born , father had a shady career, epic con man of little education, said to have immense charm, extravagant tastes and no social values. His mother seems to have been erased: perhaps lower class girl the young man impregnated.
They were often shunted off. Many traumas in young years, and in school he saw gross hypocrisy and repression; violence at the heart of all the systems.
Ridiculed for a story he wrote, and somehow managed to travel to Europe on his own, and enroll himself in University of Berne. When over, he went to Oxford, read modern languages, particularly interested in German.
Hated it; he worked as a free lance in the foreign service including the MI-6 and eventually began to write. He did not have a smashing success at first; it came not that slowly either. He made a career out of spy and detective fictions. Early one: The Small Town in Germany. Gem about a man who is destroyed because he is moral himself. The center was a character called George Smiley.
Like Graham Greene, he set his stories in Vietnam. After , he turned to issues outside the cold war. Absolute Friends, one I read recently was about a subtheme he often deals with: betrayal. Who is betraying who? Different kinds of betrayal: for example, the question Justin poses to himself is, Did Tessa have physical sex with someone else?
LeCarre is a rare male writer not to be a misogynist finally or anti-feminist. He is often deeply sympathetic to his heroines, makes them strong, independent, complicated. Not marginalized. Yet not central. As adapted into films, they are victims in the sense of LaPlante: the world stacked against them, men murderous.
In Tinker Tailor by episode 3 one young woman who gets involved with the circus spies has been abducted, probably raped, tortured, killed. The eldely actress reminded me of Dorothy Tutin. The same holds true of Meirelles Constant Gardener […]. My students learn a lot from The Constant Gardener; I learned a lot from Agora, neither of whom survived. Agora did exist for real and she survived a […]. Right here is the right website for everyone who wants to find out about this topic. You understand a whole lot its almost tough to argue with you not that I personally will need to…HaHa.
Wonderful stuff, just excellent! Read The Constant Gardener and it seems written with a screenplay in mind; it just lends itself to it, even the parts that are […]. It was sad to watch Seymour Hoffman knowing he is now dead — and at such a young age. Unless […]. It was sad to watch Seymour Hoffman knowing this man who conveys real depth of feeling and […].
We see a wayang puppet show where shadows of souls are supposedly coping with sheerly being. For […]. Comments RSS. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.
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Bernard Pellegrin Bill Nighy , the ultimate ruthless instrument One of the areas where you can get drama from this which affects people is Medicine. Zoom shot on murder of Lara Emrich in film vette Pierpaoli, a tireless relief worker he met back in the S when he traveled Indochina gathering material for The Honourable Schoolboy.
The camera brings to vivid life Finely sketched characters here: diplomats and their families Coleridge Porters for example, actually well-meaning people thrust aside and then sent back , frustrated Scotland Yarders burdened with investigating a murder beyond their jurisdiction, corporate types, and rough-and-ready aid workers — all with their own objectives.
Ellen Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here You were loyal to her. Always," she asserted, thereby incidentally implying that the same could not be said for Tessa. And the implication was not lost on him, she was sure of it: he was on the brink of talking about that wretched Arnold Bluhm when to her vexation she heard the clunk of her husband's latchkey in the door and knew the spell was broken.
Good or bad. No clues, no suspects, not as yet. No trace of Arnold. The Belgians are supplying a helicopter, London's coming up with a second. Money, money, curse of us all. Still, he's a Belgian citizen, so why not? How very pretty you're looking, sweet. What's for dins? He pretends to work late and he sits there in his office drinking while I make the boys do their homework.
She heard a movement from the window and saw to her dismay that Justin had braced himself to take his leave--scared off, no doubt, by her husband's elephantine flat-footedness. Gloria, thank you again. Sandy, good night. Whole Foreign Office struck down with grief, he says. Didn't want to intrude personally. Woodrow bolted his dinner clumsily, not tasting it as usual.
Gloria, who like Justin had no appetite, watched him. Juma their houseboy, tiptoeing restlessly between them, watched him too. 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? For hours Gloria lay awake beside her snoring husband until, fancying she heard a sound from downstairs, she crept to the landing and peered out of the window.
The power cut was over. An orange glow from the city lifted to the stars. But no Tessa lurked in the lighted garden, and no Justin either. She returned to bed to find Harry diagonally asleep with his thumb in his mouth and one arm across his father's chest. He looked flushed, she thought, a little overbusy, too much color under the brown eyes.
The boys shook his hand, gravely as instructed, and Justin meticulously returned their greetings. And Gloria, listening to every word through the serving hatch to the kitchen, could have brained him. Her private papers, lawyers' letters. Her family-trust material. Documents that are precious to both of us. I can't leave her personal correspondence sitting there for the Kenyan police to plunder at will. At once. Gloria rhapsodized. So forceful, in spite of everything!
The hacks would eat you alive. They can try and take my photograph, I suppose. They can shout at me. If I don't reply to them, that's about as far as they can go. Catch them while they're shaving. In a minute he'll call Bernard Pellegrin in London.
That's what he always does when he needs to bypass Porter Coleridge and get the answer he wants to hear. Why not write me a list of what you want and I'll pass it to Mustafa somehow and have him bring the stuff here?
Dither, haver, look for the easy way out every time. Even shopping lists defeat him. I owe it to her, Sandy. It's a debt of honor and I must discharge it. Whether or not you come along. Gloria applauded silently from her touchline. Well played, that man! But even then it did not occur to her, though her mind was opening up in all sorts of unexpected directions, that her husband might have his own reasons for wishing to visit Tessa's house.
Justin had that wrong. Or if they were, they were doing it on the grass verges outside Justin's house, where they had been camping all night in hire cars, dumping their garbage in the hydrangea bushes. A couple of African vendors in Uncle Sam pants and top hats had opened a tea stand. Others were cooking maize on charcoal. Lackluster policemen hung around a beaten-up patrol car, yawning and smoking cigarettes. Their leader, an enormously fat man in a polished brown belt and gold Rolex, was sprawled in the front passenger seat with his eyes shut.
It was half past seven in the morning. Low cloud cut off the city. Large blackbirds were changing places on the overhead wires, waiting for their moment to swoop for food. It was the same arrangement as the day before: Livingstone and Jackson up front, Woodrow and Justin hunkered on the rear seat.
The black Volkswagen had CD plates but so had every second vehicle in Muthaiga. An informed eye might have spotted the British prefix to the license number, but no such eye was present, nobody showed any interest as Livingstone drove sedately past the gates and up the gentle slope. Easing the van to a halt, he put on the hand brake. Quayle's house. What's the name of your gatekeeper? Stay with him to make sure he does exactly what he's told.
Take your time. He's turning round, they may have thought. If so, they can't have thought it long, because in the next moment he had slammed down the accelerator and was racing backwards to the gates, scattering astonished journalists to left and right of him.
The gates flew open, pulled on one side by Omari and on the other by Jackson. The van passed through, the gates slammed shut again.
Jackson on the house side leaped back into the van while Livingstone kept it rolling all the way to Justin's porch and up the two steps, to rest inches from the front door, which Justin's houseboy Mustafa, with exemplary prescience, flung open from inside while Woodrow bundled Justin ahead of him, then sprang after him into the hall, slamming the front door shut behind them as he went.
Out of respect for Tessa or the newshounds, the staff had drawn the curtains. The three men stood in the hall, Justin, Woodrow, Mustafa. Mustafa was weeping silently. Woodrow could make out his crumpled face, the grimace of white teeth, the tears set wide on the cheeks, almost underneath the ears. Justin was holding Mustafa's shoulders, comforting him. Startled by this un-English demonstration of affection on Justin's part, Woodrow was also offended by it. Justin drew Mustafa against him until Mustafa's clenched jaw rested on his shoulder.
Woodrow looked away in embarrassment. Down the passage other shadows had appeared from the servants' area: the one-armed illegal Ugandan shamba boy who helped Justin in the garden and whose name Woodrow had never managed to retain, and the illegal South Sudanese refugee called Esmeralda who was always having boy trouble.
Tessa could no more resist a sob story than she could bow to local regulations. Sometimes her household had resembled a pan-African hostel for disabled down-and-outs. More than once, Woodrow had remonstrated with Justin on the subject but met a blank wall. Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishness or indifference. Woodrow knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This is how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death.
This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not. Gently pushing Mustafa away, Justin received Esmeralda in a double handshake during which she laid the side of her braided forehead against his. Woodrow had the sensation of being admitted to a circle of affection he had not dreamed of.
Would Juma weep like this if Gloria got her throat cut? Like hell he would. Would Ebediah? Would Gloria's new maid, whatever her name is? Justin pressed the Ugandan outdoor boy against him, fondled his cheek, then turned his back on all of them and with his right hand took a grasp of the handrail on the staircase. Looking for a moment like the old man he soon would be, he began hauling himself upward.
Woodrow watched him gain the shadows of the landing and vanish into the bedroom Woodrow had never entered, though he had imagined it in countless furtive ways. Finding he was alone, Woodrow hovered, feeling threatened, which was how he felt whenever he entered her house: a country boy come to town.
If it's a cocktail party, why don't I know these people? Whose cause are we being asked to espouse tonight? Which room will she be in? Where's Bluhm? At her side, most likely. Or in the kitchen, reducing the servants to paroxysms of helpless laughter. Remembering his purpose, Woodrow edged his way along the twilit corridor to the drawing room door.
It was unlocked. Blades of morning sunlight thrust their way between the curtains, illuminating the shields and masks and frayed handwoven throw rugs made by paraplegics, with which Tessa had succeeded in enlivening her dreary government furnishings.
How did she make everything so pretty with this junk? The same brick fireplace as ours, the same boxed-in iron girders masquerading as oak beams of Merrie England. Everything like ours but smaller, because the Quayles were childless and a rank lower. Then why did Tessa's house always seem to be the real thing, and ours its unimaginative ugly sister?
He reached the middle of the room and stopped, arrested by the power of memory. This is where I stood and lectured her, the contessa's daughter, from beside this pretty inlaid table that she said her mother had loved, while I clutched the back of this flimsy satinwood chair and pontificated like a Victorian father.
Tessa standing over there in front of the window, and the sunlight cutting straight through her cotton dress. Did she know that I was talking to a naked silhouette? That just to look at her was to see my dream of her come true, my girl on a beach, my stranger on a train? Eleven in the morning.
Chancery meeting over, Justin safely dispatched to Kampala, attending some useless three-day conference on Aid and Efficiency. I have come here on official business, but I have parked my car in a side street like a guilty lover calling on a brother officer's beautiful young wife. And God, is she beautiful. And God, is she young. Young in the high, sharp breasts that never move. How can Justin let her out of his sight?
Young in the gray, wideangry eyes, in the smile too wise for her age. Woodrow can't see the smile because she is backlit.
But he can hear it in her voice. Her teasing, foxing, classy voice. He can retrieve it in his memory anytime. As he can retrieve the line of her waist and thighs in the naked silhouette, the maddening fluidity of her walk, no wonder she and Justin fell for one another--they're from the same thoroughbred stable, twenty years apart. Bluhm, or another of her lovers? Quayle never called her Tess. Nor did Ghita, as far as Woodrow knew. Your opinions.
But he never reaches the end of it. The word "duty" has stung her into action. What's yours? As Justin's is. To my Service and my Head of Mission.
Does that answer you? Not nearly. It's miles off. I came here to ask you to stop shooting your mouth off about the misdoings of the Moi government in front of every Tom, Dick and Harry in Nairobi. I came here to ask you to be one of the team for a change, instead of--oh, finish the sentence for yourself," he ends rudely.
Would I have talked to her like that if I'd known she was pregnant? Probably not so baldly. But I would have talked to her. Did I guess that she was pregnant while I tried not to notice her naked silhouette? I was wanting her beyond bearing, as she could tell by the altered state of my voice and the stiltedness of my movements.
It's worse. It's pusillanimous. Why can't you do anything about them? The Moi government is terminally corrupt, you tell me. I never doubted it. The country is dying of AIDS, it's bankrupt, there is not a corner of it, from tourism to wildlife to education to transport to welfare to communications, that isn't falling apart from fraud, incompetence and neglect.
Well observed. Ministers and officials are diverting lorry-loads of food aid and medical supplies earmarked for starving refugees, sometimes with the connivance of aid agency employees, you say. Of course they are.
Expenditure on the country's health runs at five dollars per head per year and that's before everybody from the top of the line to the bottom has taken his cut. The police routinely mishandle anybody unwise enough to bring these matters to public attention. Also true. You have studied their methods. They use water torture, you say. They soak people, then beat them, which reduces visible marks. You are right. They do. They are not selective.
And we do not protest. They also rent out their weapons to friendly murder gangs, to be returned by first light or you don't get your deposit back. The High Commission shares your disgust, but still we do not protest. Why not? Because we are here, mercifully, to represent our country, not theirs. We have thirty-five thousand indigenous Britons in Kenya whose precarious livelihood depends on President Moi's whim. The High Commission is not in the business of making life harder for them than it already is.
Trading with emerging countries is not a sin. Trade helps them to emerge, as a matter of fact. It makes reforms possible. The kind of reforms we all want.
It brings them into the modern world. It enables us to help them. How can we help a poor country if we're not rich ourselves? Look around you. Trade isn't making the poor rich. Profits don't buy reforms. They buy corrupt government officials and Swiss bank accounts. No action at this time. Signed, Sandy. The mother of democracies is once more revealed as a lying hypocrite, preaching liberty and human rights for all, except where she hopes to make a buck.
All right, Moi's Boys are crooks and the old man still has a couple of years to run. But good things are on the horizon. A word in the right ear--the collective withholding of donor nations' aid--quiet diplomacy--they're all having their effect. And Richard Leakey is being drafted into the Cabinet to put a brake on corruption and reassure donors that they can start giving again without financing Moi's rackets. Worse, she knows it too, as evidenced by a very big yawn.
And waits for a reciprocal sign from her to indicate that they are moving toward some kind of cobbled truce. But Tessa, he remembers too late, is not a conciliator, neither is her bosom pal Ghita. They are both young enough to believe there is such a thing as simple truth. Will that be a word in the right ear too? Or is nobody listening out there? I hear you. But for heaven's sake--in the name of sanity--you can't seriously be suggesting that HMG in the person of Bernard Pellegrin should be conducting a witchhunt against named ministers of the Kenyan government!
I mean, my God--it's not as if we Brits were above corruption ourselves. Is the Kenyan High Commissioner in London about to tell us to clean up our act? He has not reckoned with Mustafa. He enters silently, at the stoop. First with great accuracy he sets a small table midway between them on the carpet, then a silver tray with a silver coffeepot and her late mother's silver sweetmeat basket filled with shortbread. And the intrusion clearly stimulates Tessa's ever-present sense of theater, for she kneels upright before the little table, shoulders back, dress stretched across her breasts while she punctuates her speech with humorously barbed inquiries about his tastes.
This is the Pharisaic life we lead--she is telling him--a continent lies dying at our door, and here we stand or kneel drinking coffee off a silver tray while just down the road children starve, the sick die and crooked politicians bankrupt the nation that was tricked into electing them. Name 'em, shame 'em, chop their heads off and spike 'em on the city gates, says I. The trouble is, it doesn't work. The same List of Shame is published every year in the Nairobi newspapers, and the same Kenyan politicians feature in it every time.
Nobody is sacked, nobody is hauled up before the courts. You're a status quo man. That's a decision you've taken. It hasn't been thrust upon you. You took it. You, Sandy. You looked in the mirror one day and you thought: Hullo, me, from now on I'll treat the world as I find it. I'll get the best deal I can for Britain, and I'll call it my duty. Never mind if it's a duty that accounts for the survival of some of the foulest governments on the globe.
I'll do it anyway. He silently declines it. I want to speak up. You want me to bury my head where yours is. One woman's duty is another man's cop-out. What's new? And she, apparently, has sworn not to hear it. By some bitter inner discipline she keeps her lips tightly closed while she waits for him to make an even bigger fool of himself. Which he duly does. Now it turns out you've come to save Justin from me. How very laddish of you.
But unlike Woodrow she does not lose her self-control. People will begin to talk about us. I won't send you more documents, you'll be relieved to hear. We can't have you wearing out the High Commissioner's shredder, can we? You might lose promotion points. I was drunk, I was mad, he told himself in extenuation of this act. I had a craving to do something rash. I was trying to bring the roof tumbling round my head so that I would see clear sky.
One piece of paper--that's all he asked as he frantically slewed and skimmed his way through drawers and shelves--one insignificant sheet of Her Majesty's Stationery Office blue, with one side of writing, mine, saying the unsayable in words that for once do not equivocate, do not say, On the one hand this, but on the other hand there's nothing I can do about it--signed not S or SW but Sandy in good, legible script and very nearly the name WOODROW in block capitals after it to show the whole world and Tessa Quayle that, for five deranged minutes back in his office that same evening, with her naked silhouette still taunting his memory, and a king-sized glass of hospitality whisky at his timid lover's elbow, one Sandy Woodrow, Head of Chancery at the British High Commission in Nairobi, performed an act of unique, deliberate, calculated lunacy, putting at risk career, wife and children in a doomed effort to bring his life closer to his feelings.
And having written as he wrote, had enclosed said letter in Her Majesty's envelope and sealed said envelope with a whisky-flavored tongue. Woodrow, sir," to his departing back. Old invitation cards marked with a cross for "no" in Tessa's hand. Others, more emphatically marked, "never. A twist of ribbon, a wine cork, a bunch of diplomats' calling cards held together with a bulldog clip.
Take a grip on yourself, man, he urged, as he fought to turn bad news into good. All right: no letter. Why should there be a letter? After twelve months? Probably chucked it in the wastepaper basket the day she got it. A woman like that, compulsive flirt, husband a wimp, she gets a pass made at her twice a month.
Three times! He was sweating. In Africa, sweat broke out on him in a greasy shower, then dried up. He stood head forward, letting the torrent fall, listening. What's the bloody man doing up there? Softly back and forth? Private papers, he had said. Lawyers' letters. What papers did she keep upstairs that were too private for the ground floor? The drawing room telephone was ringing. It had been ringing nonstop ever since they entered the house, but he had only now noticed it. Who cares?
He let it ring. He was plotting the upstairs layout of his own house and applying it to this one. Justin was directly above him, left of the stairwell as you went up.
There was a dressing room and there was the bathroom and there was the main bedroom. Woodrow remembered Tessa telling him she had converted the dressing room into a workroom: It's not only men who have dens, Sandy. Us girls have them too, she had told him provocatively, as if she were instructing him in body parts.
The rhythm changed. Now you're collecting stuff from round the room. What stuff? To me too maybe, thought Woodrow, in a sickening reminder of his folly. Discovering he was now standing at the window overlooking the back garden, he poked aside the curtain and saw festoons of flowering shrubs, the pride of Justin's "open days" for junior staff when he served strawberries and cream and cold white wine and gave them the tour of his Elysium.
It was the only subject, come to think of it, on which he had been known to boast. Woodrow squinted sideways along the shoulder of the hill. The Quayle house was no distance from his own.
The way the hill ran, they could see one another's lights at night. His eye homed on the very window from which too often he had been moved to stare in this direction. Suddenly he was as near as he ever came to weeping. Her hair was in his face. He could swim in her eyes, smell her perfume and the scent of warm sweet grass you got from her when you were dancing with her at Christmas at the Muthaiga Club and by sheer accident your nose brushed against her hair.
It's the curtains, he realized, waiting for his half tears to recede. They've kept her scent and I'm standing right up against them. On an impulse he grabbed the curtain in both hands, about to bury his face in it. Sorry to have kept you waiting.
Justin was looming in the doorway, looking as flustered as Woodrow felt and clutching a long, orange, sausageshaped leather Gladstone bag, fully laden and very scuffed, with brass screws, brass corners and brass padlocks either end. Debt of honor discharged? That's the way then. And you've got everything you came for, all that? To a point. I don't mean to. It was her father's," he explained, making a gesture with the bag. He offered a hand to help him, but Justin preferred to carry his booty for himself.
Woodrow climbed into the van, Justin climbed after him, to sit with one hand curled over its old leather carrying handles. The taunts of journalists came at them through the thin walls: "Do you reckon Bluhm topped her, Mr. Press coverage of Tessa's murder was at first not half as dire as Woodrow and his High Commissioner had feared.
Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing, Coleridge cautiously observed, appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something.
To begin with, that was what they did. The increasing hazards to aid workers around the globe were dwelled upon, there were stinging editorials on the failure of the United Nations to protect its own and the ever-rising cost of humanitarians brave enough to stand up and be counted. There was high talk of lawless tribesmen seeking whom they might devour, ritual killings, witchcraft and the gruesome trade in human skins.
Much was made of the presence of roving gangs of illegal immigrants from Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. But nothing at all of the irrefutable fact that Tessa and Bluhm, in full view of staff and guests, had shared a cabin on the night before her death.
Bluhm was "a Belgian aid official"--right--"a United Nations medical consultant"--wrong-"an expert in tropical diseases"--wrong--and was feared abducted by the murderers, to be held for ransom or killed.
The bond between the experienced Dr. Arnold Bluhm and his beautiful young protegee was commitment, it was humanitarian. And that was all it was. Noah made it only to the first editions, then died a second death.
Black blood, as every Fleet Street schoolboy knows, is not news, but a decapitation is worth a mention. An editorial in the Guardian made much of the fact that the Millennium's New Woman Diplomat [sic] should have met her death at Leakey's cradle of mankind, and drew from this the disquieting moral that, though racial attitudes may change, we cannot plumb the wells of savagery that are to be found at the heart of every man's darkness.
The piece lost some of its impact when a subeditor unfamiliar with the African continent set Tessa's murder on the shores of Lake Tanganyika rather than Turkana. There were photographs of her galore. Cheerful baby Tessa in the arms of her father the judge in the days when His Honor was a humble barrister struggling along on half a million a year. Ten-year-old Tessa in plaits and jodhpurs at her rich girl's private school, docile pony in background.
Teenaged Golden Girl Tessa in bikini, her uncut throat artfully highlighted by the photographic editor's airbrush. Tessa in saucily pitched mortarboard, academic gown and miniskirt. Tessa in the ludicrous garb of a British barrister, following in her father's footsteps.
Tessa on her wedding day, and Old Etonian Justin already smiling his older Etonian's smile. Toward Justin, the press showed an unusual restraint, partly because they wished nothing to tarnish the shining image of their instant heroine, partly because there was precious little to say about him.
Justin was "one of the FO'S loyal middle-rankers"--read "pen pusher"--a long-term bachelor "born into the diplomatic tradition" who before his marriage had flown the flag in some of the world's least favored hot spots, among them Aden and Beirut. Colleagues spoke kindly of his coolness in crisis.
In Nairobi he had headed a "hightech international forum" on aid. Nobody used the word "backwater. A "family snap" showed a clouded, inward-looking youth who with hindsight seemed marked down for early widowhood. It was abstracted, Justin confessed under pressure from his hostess, from a group picture of the Eton rugby team. How very plucky of you," cried Gloria, whose self-appointed task each morning after breakfast was to take him his letters of commiseration and newspaper cuttings sent up by the High Commission.
The school had no business releasing that photograph. A faxed Foreign Office letter to this effect, addressed to Justin at the High Commission and signed "Alison Landsbury, Head of Personnel," had produced an almost violent effect on Gloria.
She could not afterward remember an occasion when she so nearly lost control of herself. He jokes with her, shares his discoveries, asks her questions and, when he is dispirited, she spurs him on. His sections of the novel are marinated in her fictional, hallucinated presence.
This is often very powerful and affecting. Suddenly he is in Canada, in the town of Saskatchewan. This is one of the research centres of KVH pharmaceuticals Canadian HQ in Vancouver and he has come to meet one of the women involved in the original research, the fierce, humourless Dr Lara Emrich who, he discovers, has been hounded out of the university science department for criticising Dypraxa. KVH funds all kinds of research programs at the university, and so her out-spoken criticism a jeopardises that b leads quickly to her dismissal.
Emrich had done extensive research on the adverse side-effects of Dypraxa on patients, submitted it to a learned journal where it was rejected, but the supposedly independent peer reviewers tipped off KVH and a her contract was cancelled b she received threatening notes in the post c she started being followed. Emrich gives a summary of the situation:. She and Justin are both so paranoid that they arrange to meet at neither her house nor his hotel but at the house of a third party, who turns out to be the fat, straight-talking Amy and her grumpy husband Ralph p.
Two prowling cars approach, then one accelerates and tries to run them over. They jump into the car and drive off, the two flat tyres flumping against the road, just managing to evade the pursuing men long enough to make it to the ambulance station at the hospital.
In a central scene we witness the head of ThreeBees, the obese very sweary Sir Kenny Curtiss yelling at Donohue, and the nature of their relationship is laid bare. Donohue of British Intelligence helps ThreeBees. This is made very explicit: Curtiss supplies good intelligence about dodgy arms deals or drug trading or other wrong-doing, and in exchange expects protection and support from the Commission and Donohue.
The CEOs of big pharma companies are slender, well groomed and very clever men, to judge from their pics in the FT. Leaving Curtiss with his threats to stop helping MI6 ringing in his ears, Donohue encounters his side-kick, Crick, a scary ex-soldier who says he has a friend who has a friend who heard a little something about a contract being put out on Tess and Bluhm. Donohue has a bad feeling that Crick might have been directly involved himself.
With a hundred pages still to go the reader has now got a very good sense of the story. And the generally ominous, tragic atmosphere of the book when it is not being laughably posh and legendary strongly suggests that Justin himself will come to no good.
Therefore, the book has little sense of the unexpected or of suspense. In the final hundred pages Justin returns to Kenya under a false passport for the last part of the tragedy. Here he is hussled into a car containing the well-disguised Justin, who proceeds to make it clear that he knows all about the conspiracy, all about Dypraxa. Devastatingly, he knows that Tessa entrusted a copy of her findings to Sandy to give to someone trustworthy to publicise, but that instead Sandy simply handed them over to his boss, Coleridge.
Justin takes Woodward to an empty house and gets him to confess everything, blubbering like the cowardly reptile he is. These pages confirm the corrupt intertwining between the ThreeBees corporation, British officials in the High Commission, the corrupt Kenyan government and powerful forces back in London.
Immediately following this Justin has a final interview with Donohue, who fills in the rest of the picture. At some risk to his own career, Donohue fills in the gaps about the links between Curtiss, Crick and the murderers. But he also emphasises that Curtiss is himself in big financial trouble. The City has got wind of bad news about Dypraxa, ThreeBees shares are falling, Curtiss is in financial meltdown. In the last act of the novel Justin takes a plane up to the northern outpost from which where Tessa and Bluhm had gone on their ill-fated drive, Lokichoggio, where Ghita had earlier visited.
But Justin confronts him because now he knows that Brandt is also the villainous Lorbeer, who oversaw the development of Dypraxa, who is in cahoots with KVH. In fact, now Justin recognises him as the furtive figure in a white coat who sometimes attended on the dying African mother Wanzi, when Justin was visiting Tessa in the maternity hospital. In a hot sweaty African tent Justin confronts him with all the evidence and Lorbeer collapses in tears, weeping and wailing and calling on God to forgive his sins etc.
But its main purpose is for the chivalrous Etonian Justin to confront the wicked Germanic baddy. Buried beneath the modern trappings, is the spirit of John Buchan. While sitting there he hears, first the little fishing boat tactfully putting back across the lake, abandoning him — and then the sound of vehicles drawing up. He knows it is the same collection of mercenaries. He hears them scrabbling towards him over the loose sand and rock and knows he is going to die. A court case is launched using the documents Justin had, throughout his investigation, been posting to a safe house in Italy, where his lawyer friend Ham could access them.
But it is quickly silenced by powerful lawyers acting for ThreeBees which will ensure the case drags on forever. Or murdered. Evil wins. The novel is designed to leave you terrified at the power of Big Pharma, at the scale of the links between big business and government, at the ease with which they can repress the truth.
Third World corruption Nobody reading the novel can be unaware that corruption is endemic throughout the developing world. It comes as no news that some African rulers are corrupt, that a lot of the foreign aid given to Third World countries is siphoned off by corrupt officials, that white ex-pats in Africa live like kings while the majority of Africans around them subsist in squalid shanties and die like flies.
Yet they just as routinely deplore the corruption and inefficiency of the current regime, reflecting, by implication or overtly, on how much better they would run the damn place. Tessa is on a one-woman mission to save Africa, especially all African women. Big pharma, bad pharma The most controversial aspect of the novel must be the central claim that one or some pharmaceutical companies unscrupulously trial new drugs in developing countries, happy to use poor Africans who were going to die anyway, as Sir Kenneth Curtiss angrily points out as guinea pigs to establish safe dosages which will then be used back in the Western world.
Could such things happen? I know various scandals about pharma behaviour in Third World countries have been documented, especially around the pricing of life-saving drugs particularly for AIDS. The second accusation is that these companies, or high-up people associated with them, could have a word with someone who has a word with someone who puts the word out that so-and-so public critics of said company should meet with an unfortunate accident.
No doubt. Have I ever read of such a thing? But it was published. The novel, with its baggy definition as a long piece of prose fiction, can include any amount of fact, history, politics, denunciation and journalism. The question is — or a question is — do these accusations work in the context of this novel? For a young person who is new to these issues I can imagine this book might be a devastating wake-up call. Their job is to protect the persons of the 30, or so British citizens living in Kenya and their business interests.
What else would you expect? What else would she expect? If these issues were new to you, maybe you would be drawn into the sense of horrible dark revelations and the ominous atmosphere the novel is, presumably, setting out to create.
But for me:. No, is the short answer. The thriller genre takes for granted scheming baddies, evil drug dealers or arms dealers, Blofeld or the KGB. The idea that the good guys themselves turn out to be penetrated by corruption and evil goes back at least as far as the s and the outburst of conspiracy thrillers following Watergate, in fact probably back to the Kennedy assassination in the s, maybe to the McCarthyite paranoia of the s, or possibly to John Buchanite concerns about communists and Jews in the government of dear old Blighty.
And so on. Tessa, who the plot rotates around is — as you are continually reminded — the daughter of a High Court judge and an Italian contessa! She is phenomenally posh totty.
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