The Constant Gardener by John le Carré. Hodder and Stoughton, £16.99, pp 508. ISBN 0340 73338 1. Rating: ★★★★
John le Carré is famous for his brilliant espionage novels. Now it seems to him that the vacuum left by the cold war is being filled by the greed of multinational corporations. That makes him despair and led to his new novel—a story about power, lying, corruption, and social responsibility.
It begins with the brutal and unexplained murder in rural Kenya of Tessa Quayle, a radical young lawyer and aid worker married to Justin, a diplomat in the British High Commission in Nairobi. Two Scotland Yard detectives sent to investigate find that she had, without telling her husband, sent the High Commission documents with compelling evidence that Dypraxa, an important new anti-tuberculosis drug, was being unethically tested on Africans. The High Commission and the Foreign Office sweep the problem under the carpet, and the detectives are taken off the job.
Meanwhile, Justin returns to England and secretly pursues the investigation by himself. He assumes a false identity and visits key people with whom Tessa had been in touch—in Germany, Canada, Sudan. He is followed, threatened, and beaten up by mysterious pursuers but gradually pieces together what has been going on.
Dypraxa was discovered by two scientists in the former East Germany and spotted by a messianic wheeler-dealer who used flattery and bribes to have it “fully tested” and registered in Germany, Poland, and Russia. Karel Vita Hudson (KVH), a major multinational drug company based in Vancouver and Basel, buys the molecule and sells the rights to distribute the drug throughout Africa to Three Bees, a British conglomerate and the biggest company in Kenya. KVH plans to test Dypraxa in Africa for two or three years, by which time tuberculosis will have become a huge problem in the West. By then Three Bees is likely to be in financial trouble, and KVH expects to buy it out cheaply. Dodgy trials in Kenya reveal serious toxicity—liver failure, optic nerve damage, and bleeding—but Three Bees “loses” the records, and witnesses are silenced. KVH funds trials in Canada, but when the investigator finds similar effects and tries to publish the data the company vilifies and sacks her.
Le Carré, who helpfully acknowledges his sources in a postscript, is subtle in his handling of the many issues about drugs in poor countries. The story unfolds admirably, and its main characters are convincing and interesting. This is not an anti-industry novel but a splendid thriller that none the less deserves to be taken seriously.