The Eternal Gardener (novel)

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The Eternal Gardener (English original title: The Constant Gardener ) is a novel by the British writer John le Carré from 2001. The political thriller is about illegal drug tests by a multinational pharmaceutical company in Africa with fatal consequences. The UK government is also involved. In 2005, a film of the same name was released in cinemas.

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Lake Turkana in Kenya

A murder on Lake Turkana in northern Kenya throws the British High Commission in Nairobi into an uproar. The brutally murdered victims are Tessa Quayle, the young wife of Justin Quayles, an employee of the embassy , and their local driver. Together with the missing Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, who is said to have a love affair with Tessa, they were on their way to the Sibiloi National Park . But Alexander Woodrow, known as "Sandy", the deputy high commissioner not only fears that piquant details about the diplomatic wife and her dark-skinned confidante could leak to the public. He himself, unhappily married to his wife Gloria, was passionately in love with Tessa and, contrary to his career-oriented nature, allowed her to hire him for humanitarian actions. Shortly before her death, for example, he sent a secret letter to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office , namely the Africa Commissioner Sir Bernard Pellegrin, in which Tessa denounced the illegal machinations of the British group Bell, Barker & Benjamin , known throughout Africa as ThreeBees .

Scotland Yard sends two young officers named Rob and Lesley to Nairobi to investigate the murder . They soon find out that the act bears traces of a professional murder assignment and that the motives are to be found in Tessa's humanitarian work. When the young woman was pregnant, she wanted to give birth in an African hospital. There she witnessed employees Threebees headed by the Dutch physician Markus Laurel locals for drug testing of unapproved tuberculosis -Medikaments Dypraxa abused and the death of a test person indebted. After the stillbirth of her child, Tessa fell into a depression from which only the fight against the machinations of ThreeBees could tear her. Together with Bluhm, she gathered evidence of the deadly experiments with Dypraxa . Rob and Lesley's investigation goes too far for the UK authorities, who are indebted to Kenneth Curtiss, owner of ThreeBees . The two officers are recalled and can only hand over their investigation results to Tessa's bereaved husband in an act of civil disobedience. Officially, Tessa's death is blamed on her missing companion Arnold Bluhm.

Justin Quayle is still shaken by the death of his wife, who apart from gardening was the only great love of his life. The two spouses had an agreement under which he gave Tessa every freedom to carry out her humanitarian activities, but this never undermined his loyalty to his employer. Now he reproaches himself for not having supported her in their fight. Returning to London he goes into hiding and tries to investigate the death of his wife and its background on his own. He finds out that the Swiss-Canadian pharmaceutical company KVH aka Karel Vita Hudson is behind the activities of ThreeBees . A team led by Laurel developed the drug Dypraxa for the group , which promised immeasurable profits for the predicted outbreak of a tuberculosis pandemic . When deadly side effects began to emerge, the company had to silence critics of the untested drug in order to keep it on the market. Tessa also received death threats after Pellegrin forwarded her investigation results to KVH , and Justin is repeatedly attacked by unknown thugs during his investigation.

Approach to Lokichoggio

Incognito, Justin Quayle returns to Kenya to reconstruct his wife's last trip. He reaches a humanitarian supply camp for South Sudan in Lokichoggio under the direction of the missionary Brandt, where he recognizes Markus Lorbeer. Laurel suffers from the effects of the medication he is promoting and tries to pay off his guilt through religious penance. But he remains a torn person who betrayed Tessa and Arnold Bluhm to his former employers when they tracked him down and confronted him with his past. Justin Quayle is also betrayed after revealing himself to Laurel and questioning his morals. While visiting the place where his wife died on Lake Turkana, he is surprised by a killer squad. His death is reported as a suicide by official UK sources. Everyone involved in the case falls to the top: Sandy Woodrow becomes the new high commissioner in Kenya, Bernard Pellegrin takes on a board position at KVH . Three Bees is dissolved, but Kenneth Curtiss's business is not affected. After all, Quayle's posthumously published records lead to a parliamentary request and a lawsuit against the State Department for the surrender of Tessa's documents.

background

Yvette Pierpaoli (1997)

John le Carré dedicated The Eternal Gardener to the French refugee worker Yvette Pierpaoli , "who refused to look away". In an article in the New Yorker , he described his first encounter with Pierpaoli in 1974 while researching the novel Eine Kind Held in Phnom Penh and how much he was impressed by the woman who worked with all her energy for the hungry, the sick, the homeless and homeless. A longstanding bond developed from the encounter. Although he gave her a different background, le Carré modeled Tessa Quayle on the model of Pierpaolis. She died in a traffic accident in Albania in April 1999 while he was doing research in Kenya.

Other influences in the novel were a bearded biker whom le Carré met in Basel around 1980 and who railed heavily at the pharmaceutical companies in the Upper Rhine region, which he dubbed “multinationals”. More than the contents of his tirades, Le Carré was impressed by the anger of the former chemist who had become an anarchist , and he had been planning for a long time to immortalize the attacked “multinationals” in a novel. The figure of the "eternal gardener", on the other hand, goes back to an elegant London businessman who around five years later gave away flowers he had grown himself to the guests of a small restaurant. Everyone called him the “crazy gardener” and through his evening appearances he dealt with the grief of a deceased relative. Under the impression of the encounter, Le Carré began a manuscript entitled The Mad Gardener , which he soon set aside. Nevertheless, some plot elements from The Constant Gardener can already be found in the unfinished manuscript, not least the protagonist's mourning for his recently deceased wife.

In the follow-up to The Eternal Gardener , le Carré stated that “neither people nor any corporations in this novel are designed according to real models”. At the same time, however, he emphasized: "The deeper I went into the pharmaceutical jungle, the more I realized that my novel was about as harmless as a holiday postcard compared to reality." Parallels were often drawn between le Carré's novel and the pharmaceutical company Pfizer , who had his antibiotic trovafloxacin tested in 1996 with fatal consequences on children in Nigeria (see: Trials against Pfizer in Nigeria and the USA ). A reference to the case, however, speaks against the fact that it only became public knowledge in December 2000 through a report in the Washington Post and that le Carré himself denied any connection. In his essay Big Pharma vs. In the year of publication of the novel, le Carré castigated "Multibillion dollar multinationals who regard the exploitation of the sick and dying of this world as a sacred duty to their shareholders". He limited himself to general charges and first mentioned the name Pfizer as an example in the last few sentences.

interpretation

The beginning of The Eternal Gardener , which initially focuses on secondary characters, is unusual . Only on page 145 does the protagonist Justin Quayle come to the fore. Paul Ingendaay explains: "The author does not want to reveal his main character right away, but first lets others talk about him". The widower is just politely silent about the various pictures he has designed. "Justin is a quiet flower lover, so reserved and modest that one wonders if he's even casting a shadow." For Thomas Wörtche , the real heroine of the novel is a dead person: the murdered Tessa Quayle, who is still posthumously accused of being an infidelity “in the hypocritical, post-Victorian climate” of the British upper class. In the embassy there is the mean "old-boy, Eton - Oxbridge - Whitehall " swamp, whom le Carré knows so well from his own time with the British Security Service . But the alleged adulteress turns from a whore to a saint, according to Harald Martenstein a "lady without a belly" who cleans le Carré of all eroticism. Fritz Rumler sees her as “a Jeanne d'Arc of development aid”, Eberhard Falcke a homage to modern women.

From the initially purely private motives of a crime out of passion, the plot turns into a global conspiracy. The hunt leads through Kenya, England, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Canada to Sudan in seven countries on three continents. The protagonist turns out to be "a knight with rather thin armor - a hero to tremble for". For Harald Martenstein, Quayle “moves strangely indifferently through the plot. A man risks his life, but he hardly seems to feel anything. ”According to Jost Hindersmann, he has to make a decision between the institution to which he has been loyally connected for his entire life and an individual, his beloved wife. As usual with le Carré, he opts for the individual. Quayle turns out to be an honorable schoolboy who thinks about his morals, an agent on his own behalf and "gardener who chases the murderer" who consistently goes his way to the end in the heart of darkness .

In The Secret Companion , le Carré had already let his retired secret agent George Smiley guess that with the decline of socialism the right side had lost, but the wrong side had won. According to Jost Hindersmann, he continues this idea in Der Ewige Gärtner : The hopes for a better world have not been fulfilled, politics - “an almost Marxist idea” - is determined by the profit interests of the large corporations. For Hans-Peter Schwarz , the "pronounced anti-capitalist books" in le Carré's later creative phase gave up any hope of eliminating the grievances in the world and instead demonstrate "the failure of complicated do-gooders ". For Thomas Wörtche, however, le Carré remains the “arch-conservative moralist” who “uses conservative methods to arrive at 'left' insights minus sentimentality and social romanticism”.

reception

According to Rand Richards Copper in The Eternal Gardener, John le Carré proves to be “an excellent moralist of the everyday”, but the novel remains merely “an exposé, an angry tirade against corporate misconduct with sentimental descriptions of Tessa and her courageous deeds […], the fall far behind the subtle insights of his best days. ” Harald Martenstein criticizes:“ One-dimensional characters, flawlessly good or hopelessly bad, without development, without breaks and facets. The plot is used by the author to denounce circumstances that he, probably rightly, consider outrageous. A non-fiction book is often the better solution in such cases. ” Reiner Luyken also considers the recently published series of articles in the Washington Post about the real machinations of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer to be more interesting than Le Carré's novel:“ A committed novel is not a good novel per se . "Paul Ingendaay agrees:" The humanitarian commitment with all honors, a thriller like this has never helped to get off the ground. "

Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, welcomes the increasing radicalism of the author after the end of the Cold War : “This is by far his most passionate and angry novel to date.” Thomas Wörtche also sees the author as gripped by “a gratifying radicalism of old age” that “pulls him full of leather “Lasse:“ Le Carré caricatures, mocks, ironicizes and builds his wonderful dialogues with the famous afterburner effect ”, and this“ with all the art of a great writer ”. Fritz Rumler has a similar opinion: “John le Carré, the spy who came to literature from the cold, is a master of his craft, both practically and mentally. […] Le Carré has never been so grim. ”For Niels Werber, the“ narrative transition from the private spheres of a passionate murder to a global plot […] is masterful ”. In Kenya under Daniel arap Moi , the work could only be sold under the counter due to its explosive nature.

In 2005, the film adaptation of Fernando Meirelles' The Eternal Gardener came into the cinemas. Starring Ralph Fiennes as Justin Quayle, Rachel Weisz , who was named Best Supporting Actress at the 2006 Academy Awards , as Tessa Abbott Quayle, Hubert Koundé as Arnold Bluhm and Danny Huston as Sandy Woodrow. In 2001 Rufus Beck read an abbreviated audio book version for Ullstein Verlag .

expenditure

  • John le Carré: The Constant Gardener . Hodder & Stoughton, London 2001, ISBN 0-340-73337-3 .
  • John le Carré: The Eternal Gardener . Translated from the English by Werner Schmitz with the assistance of Karsten Singelmann. List, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-471-78078-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John le Carré: The Constant Muse . In: The New Yorker, December 25, 2000. Reprinted . In: The Observer of February 25, 2001.
  2. ↑ John le Carré: Post Comment . In: The Eternal Gardener , pp. 555–556.
  3. ↑ Tod Hoffman: Le Carré's Landscape . McGill-Queen's University Press. Quebec 2001, ISBN 0-7735-2262-X , pp. 252-253.
  4. ↑ Joe Stephens: Where Profits and Lives Hang in Balance . In: The Washington Post, December 17, 2000.
  5. ↑ Jim Edwards: Claim: LeCarre's "The Constant Gardener" Was Based on Pfizer Trovan Case . In: CBSNews of February 17, 2009.
  6. ↑ John le Carré: Big Pharma vs. Human life . In: Die Welt of March 5, 2001.
  7. ^ A b c Paul Ingendaay : Evil does not only flourish in Bielefeld . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of April 28, 2001.
  8. ↑ a b c Thomas Wörtche : The radical . In: The week of April 12, 2001.
  9. ^ Rand Richards Cooper: Company Man . In: The New York Times, Jan. 7, 2001.
  10. ↑ a b c Harald Martenstein : "The eternal gardener": Pharma-Fama . In: Der Tagesspiegel from July 27, 2001.
  11. ↑ a b Fritz Rumler: In the heart of darkness . In: Der Spiegel from April 2, 2001.
  12. ↑ a b Review notes on The Eternal Gardener (novel) at perlentaucher.de .
  13. ^ A b Niels Werber : In the pharmaceutical jungle . In: the daily newspaper of May 5, 2001.
  14. ^ Jost Hindersmann: John le Carré. The spy turned writer . NordPark, Wuppertal 2002, ISBN 3-935421-12-5 , pp. 48-49.
  15. ^ Jost Hindersmann: John le Carré. The spy turned writer . NordPark, Wuppertal 2002, ISBN 3-935421-12-5 , p. 49.
  16. ↑ Hans-Peter Schwarz : Fantastic Reality. The 20th century as reflected in the political thriller . DVA, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-421-05875-X , p. 179.
  17. ↑ "Le Carré is a superb moralist of the quotidian [...] 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. ”Quoted from: Rand Richards Cooper: Company Man . In: The New York Times, Jan. 7, 2001.
  18. ↑ Reiner Luyken : Murder on the shore of Lake Turkana . In: Die Zeit of April 5, 2001.
  19. ↑ “le Carrés work has become increasingly radical, and this is by far his most passionately angry novel yet.” Quoted from: The Constant Gardener . In: Publishers Weekly, December 4, 2000.
  20. ↑ The Constant Gardener in the Internet Movie Database (English)