They said the new world order would destroy him: instead he has patiently dissected it, picking away at its fraying seams like a heedless child at a scab. The Tailor of Panama was big and generous; Single & Single was fast and furious; by comparison with the busy-ness of those two novels, and despite its shifts in setting from the sweltering plains of Africa to the frozen wastes of Saskatchewan via Germany, Italy and, of course, London, The Constant Gardener is a veritable exercise in stillness. When the beautiful young wife of British diplomat Justin Quayle is murdered in northern Kenya there is a scandal, to be sure - but not the scandal that hits the tabloid headlines, and Justin, the languid, innocuous and unfailingly civil servant of HMG, sets off on an often internal voyage of discovery that is also the reader's. Le Carre has identified international corporate culture as the new evil empire, but he also weaves information technology, the terror of drug-resistant diseases and the supremacy of the armed thug into his 18th novel: he casts doubt on everything and everybody, and as usual, he reads his own work with a measured brilliance. Check out the (suitably indeterminate) Irish lilt he uses for the despicable Crick, PR man from hell. Just one complaint. At six hours, it's over far too soon.
