In this film, Justin is revealed as not so much passive and narrow as controlled and quietly determined. It hardly seems plausible that such a man would throw over his career, and risk his life, to investigate the death of his wife. Le Carré presents Justin as self-contained to the point of inertness and seemingly with no serious interests beyond his garden.
Fiennes and Weisz portray the relationship between Tessa and Justin as touching and believable, something the book fails to do. Where the film most improves on the book is in its treatment of the main characters. The many aerial shots of Kenya show the stark beauty and sweep of the African countryside, and the film also conveys in its urban scenes the miserable overcrowding and hopeless poverty in Nairobi, something the book only suggests. It is both better and worse than the book. Now The Constant Gardener has been released as a film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz and directed by Fernando Meirelles. In between the deaths, we follow Justin’s gradual awakening to the ruthless activities of a corporation too powerful to be accountable to anyone. He finally does, and at the end of the book, he too is murdered. Her husband, Justin Quayle, a seemingly docile civil servant at first, becomes obsessed with finding out why his wife was murdered and by whom. When she threatens to expose the company, she is brutally murdered, and the British government colludes in the cover-up. She stumbles across evidence that KVH is testing a dangerous tuberculosis drug, called Dypraxa, on powerless and unsuspecting poor Africans, and not reporting the resulting deaths. The heroine, Tessa Quayle, is the wife of a low-level British diplomat stationed in Nairobi, Kenya. The villain is a global pharmaceutical company called Karel Vita Hudson (KVH). I did as I was told, and found the tale apposite, to put it mildly. Shortly before I started work on my book The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, 1 a friend gave me John le Carré’s newly published novel, The Constant Gardener, and urged me to read it right away.
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