Le Carr? Seduced

...That is delivered to a pair of detectives, whose lengthy interrogations Le Carré uses to provide the reader with much necessary background as well as clues to the evasions, distortions and outright lies that are laid on by everyone they encounter, especially Sandy...

...The population of Kibera is half a million and rising, and the valley is rich in deposits of sewage, plastic bags, colorful strands of old clothing, banana and orange peel, com cobs, and anything else the city cares to dump in it...

...he's been everywhere and can describe it all with stylish specificity...

...What is new here is what his heroine calls "the great crime," a conspiracy by multinational conglomerates to foist an ill tested and lethal drug on Third World countries...

...It was an immoral distinction...

...But in works of the post-Soviet era like Single & Single, Our Game and The Night Manager, he has put his practiced techniques and favored themes to effective use...

...Rougher world these days than the one we grew up in...

...Plenty of places I wouldn't be seen dead in...

...That is not to say he has succeeded in creating another figure as winning as George Smiley, everybody's favorite British agent, or that he has produced another bookas engrossing as those that chronicled the tricky plays and ploys of Smiley and Karla, his Soviet doppelgänger...

...They get offices from me election time...

...It's old-boy camaraderie with an underlay of nasty threat: "You're on sick leave...

...The Constant Gardener is a big book, and too much of it is taken up with reiterations of the "great crime...

...This bluntness had won her Sandy's love and put a dent in his professional indifference...

...It should never have been made...

...The tale picks up pace as guilt-ridden Justin leaves his cherished garden to undertake a feat of detection that carries him from continent to continent into very dangerous waters...

...Cars, cash, secretaries with good tits...

...In The Constant Gardener, his most ambitious effort since Smiley & Co...

...She is so pure in heart, even posthumously, that the reader may be glad not to have met her when she was alive and on the warpath for her cause...

...And you're on my watch...

...totally loyal to London guidance...

...The technique, although well enough handled, comes to seem like exposition by remote control...

...Girls...

...Le Carré is at the top of his form, and the tale perks up, when he captures the lingo of Britain's public school types who run things in the one-time colonies...

...Fortunately, the author can be counted on to drop in from time to time the sort of evocative description for which he is renowned...

...So...

...In a longish interrogation, he confesses to a detective that their marriage was crucially flawed: "She follows her conscience, I get on with my job...

...There are stinging portraits of Foreign Office timeservers and ruthless drug lords, except in this case the drugs are supposedly for the welfare of humanity...

...You're in hell...

...Lot of mean chaps around with everything to go for and a lot to lose...

...Despite a gesture at creating suspense by having the computer containing Tessa's evidence fail now and then, these dryish passages have little revelatory zip...

...It was like drawing a chalk-line down the middle of our house and saying see you in bed...

...Now Justin must endure being made famous by the press as "the cuckolded British diplomat and would-be father whose butchered white wife—thus the bolder tabloids—had borne a baby by her African lover and now lay beside it in a corner of a foreign field—to quote no less than three of them on the same day— that was forever England...

...Le Carré does her and his story no favor by relying heavily on her newspaper clippings and notes and tapes for details of the villainies of drugmakers and their minions...

...When Sandy, who knows all about the prevailing corruption in Kenya, used diplomatic doubletalk to justify Western collusion with a detestable regime as an effort to improve the condition of Kenyans, Tessa called it "specious, unadulterated pompous Foreign Office bullshit...

...We are introduced to young, beautiful, impassioned, courageous Tessa Quayle only after her murder near Northern Kenya's Lake Turkana...

...But you're old Office, you know the rules and you're still an Africa man...

...I give them binges on my f.„ing boat...

...Tessa's death awakens the somnolent conscience and character of her husband, Justin, a middle-ranking British Foreign Office diplomat in Kenya...

...Chief among them is the smooth yet conflicted Sandy Woodrow, his superior at the embassy...

...Scarcely missing a beat, he turned his talents and numerous elements of his craft to new plots and new villains, producing new novels with some of the same ingredients and many of the same pleasures that brought him such success beginning with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold...

...It was like sending her off to church and telling her to pray for both of us...

...Suspicion is directed at her presumed lover, Arnold Bluhm, the beautiful black, impassioned, courageous doctor and aid worker who had joined with her in a campaign to expose the business interests that are killing off Africans for profit...

...I do business with companies that make ten times the money your shop spends in a year...

...Makes for bad manners...

...The drug in question is Dypraxa, a purported cure for tuberculosis that is being promoted by a multinational, Bell, Barker & Benjamin, known around Africa as the ThreeBees and run by the unscrupulous Sir Kenneth Curtiss...

...Justin finds assistance from an array of well-drawn secondary characters who, happily for his quest and the narrative flow, turn up opportunely as required...

...If Justin is a somewhat pallid figure, Tessa is a chronic scold...

...The portrait is overdrawn but inestimably more fun than Justin or Tessa...

...And if you're harboring so-called confidential information that you shouldn't have—in your head or anywhere else— it belongs to us not you...

...The evidence piles up until it threatens to suffocate the story itself, which comes to fitful life in the evocative descriptions and sharp characterizations of passing figures...

...Tessa appears to have infected the consciences of everybody she met...

...Long after we pretty much understand the criminal forces complicit in the murder of poor Africans, the indictment continues...

...Bubbly...

...Have his considerable authorial skills been clouded by infatuation with his own creation and her virtuous cause...

...went into retirement, his many readers can again count on finding the flashes of adventure and the vivid sense of place, whether it is the remnants of colonial Africa or the pleasure palaces of global predators...

...Plenty of plums out there for a chap who's got himself sorted...

...Can it be that Le Carré, like Justin and Sandy, has succumbed to the beauteous and noble Tessa...

...It is glib Sandy who provides a quick portrait of Justin before his redemption: "Woodrow, with charming reluctance, recited a checklist of Justin's meager attributes: a keen gardener—though, come to think of it, not so keen since she [Tessa] lost her baby—loves nothing better than toiling in the flowerbeds on a Saturday afternoon—a gentleman, whatever that means—the right sort of Etonian—courteous to a fault in his dealings with locally-employed staff, of course—kind of chap who can be relied on to dance with the wallflowers at the High Commissioner's annual bash...

...The two make a gallant if not altogether believable pair: too good to be interesting...

...More deeply, there is the mixture of heroism, cowardice, compromise, and betrayal that sustained his earlier works...

...And there is the heroine herself, perhaps the most unambiguously noble figure in Le Carre's collection of romantic women—for whom he showed a weakness in The Little Drummer Girl and The Russia House...

...Here is the cemetery where Tessa is buried: "Langata graveyard stands on a lush plateau of tall grass and red mud and flowering ornamental trees, both sad and joyful, a couple of miles outside the town and a short downhill trot to Kibera, one of Nairobi's largerslums, avast brown smearof smoking tin houses overhung with a pall of sickly African dust, crammed into the Nairobi river valley without a hand's width between them...

...Directly across the road from the graveyard the dapper offices of the Kenyan Tourist Board strut their stuff...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman It has been more than a decade since John Le Carre's fans stopped worrying about whether the spymaster of fiction would be able to recoup after the end of the Cold War, which had nurtured his muse for most of his estimable career...

...Thus do the details of the great crime emerge and emerge and keep on emerging even after the reader has learned as much as he needs to know and can bear...

...She cut to the heart of his own inner conflict with her vision of Africa: "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 crookedpoliticians bankrupt the nation that was tricked into electing them...

...If I told them what I know about your lot, you'd be history...

...Caviar...

...He has been summoned to a meeting with the unspeakable Sir Kenny K. in "this fortified ranch stuck on the shores of Lake Naivasha with its razorwire fences and security guards and zebra-skin cushions and leopard-skin rugs and antelope sofas and pink-lit mirrored booze-cabinet and satellite television set and satellite telephone, and motion sensors and panic buttons and hand-held radios" to listen to Curtiss' rant: "I buy lunch for the boys who vote your money...

...Here is Pellegrin, a Foreign Office honcho, laying down the law to Justin, who has been showing an undesirable interest in Tessa's murder...

...Le Carré has evidently been there...

...you, Donohue...

...It is a relief to get away from the unblemished Tessa and the soul-searching Justin to hear from a shrewd British intelligence operative named Donohue...