Book. Film. "The Constant Gardener".

The constant muse | Books | The Guardian:
"When John le Carré was searching for the inspiration for his new bestseller, The Constant Gardener, he realised his heroine had already been his friend for 20 years. Here, he celebrates the life of Yvette Pierpaoli, a fearless French adventuress whose tragic death the book foretells."

There was a time when, coming out of a novel, I would hit the ground running. And I knew that if I could just keep on running and not be bothered with all that boring editing and publishing nonsense, I could write another book twice as quickly as the last one. I may even have been right. But not this time. This time, I've come out shuffling. I'm like a jailbird after a long stretch: unready for life, resentful of the separation, nostalgic for the chums I'd been locked up with, and longing to get back inside where I was safe. More strangely, I have unfinished business. I have the feeling that I've written someone else's novel.

The novel in question is called The Constant Gardener. It describes a middle-aged British diplomat's search for the killers of his murdered young wife, Tessa. The diplomat's name is Justin, and he is a Foreign Office plodder employed in the British High Commission in Nairobi. The story opens with Tessa's death on the shores of Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, where she was fatally stabbed and the driver of her jeep decapitated. Her companion and putative lover, an African doctor, apparently fled the scene. The story goes on from there.


When and where did the novel begin? I always ask myself this same dumb question, and find myself fudging the answer, because there isn't one. But this time, surprisingly, I seem to have a few pointers.

Twenty years ago, on a summer's evening, a black-bearded cyclist in a beret rode through the open double doors of the beer hall in Basel where I was drinking, parked his upright push-bike at my table, and filled my head with the wicked goings on of the multis , as he called them - the giant multinational pharmaceutical companies that have built their grim castles along the banks of the Upper Rhine. His push-bike was painted white. In those days, white bicycles were symbols of revolt, rather as white shirts later symbolised anti-Noriega protesters in Panama. He had been a chemist, he said, but now he was an anarchist because he refused to take part in the poisoning of mankind. Whatever else he told me I have long forgotten, even if I understood it. As a nonscientist, I was more interested in his anarchism than in his chemistry. But as a writer I was secretly enjoying one of those frissons of forewarning: one day, I'll find a way of writing about you and your multis , I thought. And fine: today, 20 years later, I've done it. In the novel, I dump his beard and his bicycle and pour a little cold water on his anarchism. But I keep his multis , and his fury, and take them with me to Africa. And my target remains his target: the bad-boy pharmaceutical companies that, in contrast with ethically minded brothers and sisters in the same industry, would poison the globe if by doing so they could bump up their stock prices.

And it must be five years since I was sitting in a small London restaurant when an elegant, grey-suited English gentleman of the drinking class sidled in with a chatelaine's garden basket under his arm and, moving diffidently from table to table, bestowed a bunch of fresh-cut flowers on each group of diners, male or female, young or old: sweet peas, anemones, and pinks. Where there were couples, he was punctilious about addressing the man. 'For your lady, sir, if you will permit me,' he murmured in a bottled Oxbridge voice that could have belonged to a festive Jeeves. Nobody offered him money, and he asked for none. He was not the payable type. Our table got sweet peas. I remember the scent. The proprietress got pinks, for which he received a glass of wine and a kiss.

'We call him the mad gardener,' she said as he shyly took his leave, one hand for the basket, one for the doorpost.

He was an accountant, she thought, but perhaps a lawyer. He owned a large house with a garden. He had suffered a bereavement. Bestowing flowers gave him comfort. I wrote down the title 'The Mad Gardener,' and I printed it on my bulletin board. I wrote a first page of a first chapter. A bereaved, eccentric Englishman in a straw hat takes himself to live in Morocco. In the evening, he wanders the cafés and night clubs, giving flowers to the diners.

He arrived on the Monday morning steamer, out of season the way they did, another ageing, sunburned English bloody fool in a grimy white jacket and striped tie, and a Panama hat with what might have been his regimental colours on the band. Next day he was already ambling along the corniche as if he owned it, chucking up his arm at any stray Arab who gave him half a smile, doffing his Panama to the tourist ladies on their hand-held camels. He put up at the Oasis, not the Metropole - the Oasis with its peeling French colonial façade, and foul food and creaking wooden punkahs in the dining room, being what imperial nostalgics look for. And the Metropole, having all brushed steel and electric doors, being what they are running away from.

His name, if anyone cared, was Clapham. 'Like the Junction, old boy. Next stop Battersea. Had it far too easy.' He would confess with a truthless smile, to whoever would listen to him in the fly-blown watering holes favoured by resident expatriates. 'Silver spoon, never did a hand's turn, mustard at exams. Glib, that was my trouble. Terrific charmer, danced with all the ugly girls, thought it was my duty, wasted life, no question,' he would confide, as if formulating the epitaph of a lamented friend who just happened to be himself.

But I was foxing the reader a bit here: the person he was really lamenting was his dead wife. I knew it then, and I knew it years later. He was a man in search of a dead love.

I pinned the passage beside the title, where it gathered dust for years, until I took it down and shoved it in a file for lost causes. Rereading it now, and comparing it with the novel I eventually wrote, I can spot similarities that still take me by surprise. First, for reasons I can only guess at, I must have decided quite some time back to set the new novel on the African continent, and when I got down to it I stuck to that notion. In the novel, the time is the present: that is to say, President Moi's kleptocracy, which has been in power for 20-something years, and Kenya, socially and economically, is gently going to the devil. Second, when I came to put together my character Justin, I made him as British as Mr Clapham and as gallant, but not yet a failure - rather a time-serving British diplomat in Nairobi waiting to be put out to grass. All the same, 'Clapham like the Junction' is unquestionably an early shot at the character who a couple of years ago, under the name of Justin, barged his way into the novel and took it over, gardening and all. Mr Clapham is what Justin might have become if, instead of marrying a much younger woman, he had taken an early retirement and fallen back on his private money, and set himself up as another expatriate Brit with a left-over life to kill.

So those were the bits of the story which seemed to have collected in the bottom of my toolbox: a cycling anarchist, a mad gardener, a whiff of pharmaceutical Switzerland, a spent diplomat in a straw hat, a reluctant yen for Africa and former colonies.

And bereavement - why the bereavement?

Why did I insist, from the earliest lines of that first mawkish draft and all the way to the finished novel, that my main character had lost somebody very close to him, and was still looking for her? (Tessa was the very antithesis of Justin - headstrong, unswerving, and passionately involved in bringing aid and comfort to Kenya's wretched of the earth, particularly the women folk; it was on such a mercy mission that she was murdered.) Why this determination, suddenly, to write about a close and painful loss when none in recent years, thank heaven, had befallen me?

The choice of Africa does not surprise me, though I am always disconcerted to discover with what bravado, with what reckless insouciance, I have committed a couple of years of my life in advance to a subject of which I knew, at the time, next to nothing. Partly, I suppose, there was the lure of getting myself an education. And former colonies have always held an uneasy sway over me, even if my only memories of Africa till then had been lines of striped jeeps queuing up to photograph the same disconsolate lion, and safari lodges swamped with German tour groups. Like many Englishmen of my age, I was brought up to govern the natives of our overseas possessions, and I have always felt embarrassed about that. The expensive English schools that provided me with what we must call an education saw it as their duty to prepare us for the burdens of imperial rule. Once a term, a wandering preacher calling himself a career adviser would descend on our school - founded by King Edward VI and ruled in those days by the rod - and acquaint us en masse with the ways of colonial life in Malaya, Kenya and India. One well-intentioned old gentleman caused a flutter by warning us that anyone who condemned a native to death jolly well ought to attend to his execution. It was our lecturer's definition of fair play. So it's no wonder to me that a sense of colonial guilt lingers over my writing, whether the ex-colony in question is ours or someone else's. Former Palestine, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Ingushetia and Georgia have all been characters in my earlier books, so why not add Kenya to the list?

Which leaves me with bereavement , and the most unsettling passage in my 40 years of writing.

Sometime back in the mid-70s, I decided to alter my way of working. I had become too sedentary, too much the desk officer, not enough the field man. Imagination and deliberately falsified memory were no longer enough. I deserved, and needed, to share the misfortunes I was writing about. It was time I followed the advice I had rather arrogantly given to a painter friend of mine, to stop painting landscapes for a while and go live in one. Henceforth, I promised myself that if I wanted to write about a place I would go there, whether it was Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, or, most recently, Kenya and southern Sudan. In a word, I started writing on the hoof, in the company of whichever secret sharer I had appointed as my main character, and to this day that's what I like to do.

For The Honourable Schoolboy, I selected as my ghostly travelling companion the spy and Fleet Street hack Jerry Westerby, For The Little Drummer Girl, the actress Charlie. And now, for The Constant Gardener, the diplomat Justin Quayle. Put unkindly, the process is a kind of deliberately warped journalism, where nothing is quite what it is, and every encounter is examined and, if need be, recast for its dramatic possibilities. The same old corrupt, creative distortions, then, but done from the hip, in the heat of the moment, only later to be reflected on, and rewritten, in tranquillity.

And that was how, in 1974 or so, I came to meet Yvette Pierpaoli, in the house of a German diplomat in the besieged city of Phnom Penh, over a stylish dinner served to the clatter of outgoing gunfire from Lon Nol's palace, a hundred yards down the road. Yvette was accompanied by her companion, Kurt - a Swiss sea captain, what else? - and Kurt and Yvette ran a trading company called Suisindo, which operated from an old stucco house in the centre of town. She was a small, sparky, tough, brown-eyed provincial Frenchwoman in her late thirties, by turns vulnerable and raucous, and enormously empathetic. She had all the wiles. She could spread her elbows and upbraid you like a bargee. She could tip you a smile to melt your heart, cajole, flatter, and win you in any way you needed to be won.

But it was all for a cause. And the cause, you quickly learned, was an absolutely non-negotiable, visceral requirement in her to get food and money to the starving, medicines to the sick, shelter for the homeless, paper for the stateless, and, just generally, in the most secular, muscular, businesslike, down-to-earth way you could imagine, perform miracles. This did not in any way prevent her from being a resourceful and frequently shameless businesswoman, particularly when she was pitched against people whose cash, in her unshakable opinion, would be better in the pockets of the needy. Suisindo made good profits, as it had to, since much of the money that came through the front door flowed straight out the back, earmarked for whatever good purpose Yvette had set her heart on. And Kurt, the wisest and most long-suffering of men, smiled and nodded it on its way.

There is a story I must tell you about Yvette, which I heard at first hand from her, though that is no guarantee that it is entirely true. A Scandinavian aid official, enamoured of her, invited her to his private island off the coast of Sweden. I am deliberately disguising the man's identity, for he was married and a famous womaniser. Kurt and Yvette, by then in Bangkok, were on their financial uppers. A contract was at stake: would they or would they not win the Scandinavian aid agency's commission to buy several hundred thousand dollars' worth of rice and deliver it to starving Cambodian refugees on the Thai border? Their nearest competitor was a ruthless Chinese merchant who Yvette was convinced, probably on no greater evidence than her intuition, was plotting to shortchange both the aid agency and the refugees. At Kurt's urging, Yvette set off for the Swedish island. The beach house was a love nest prepared for her arrival. Scented candles, she swore, were burning in the bedroom. Her lover-to-be was ardent, but she entreated patience. Might they not first take a romantic walk on the beach? Of course! For you, anything! It's freezing cold, so they must wrap up warm. As they stumble over the sand dunes in the darkness, Yvette proposes a childhood game: I stand still. So. Now you place yourself close behind me. Closer. So. That is very nice. Now I close my eyes and you put your hands over them. You are comfortable? I, too. Now you may ask me one question, any question in the world, one only, and I must answer the absolute truth. If I do not, I am not worthy of you. You will play this game? Good. I, too. So what is your question?

His question, predictably, concerns her most intimate desires at this moment. Yvette describes them, I am sure, with brazen falsehood: she dreams, she says, of a certain handsome virile Scandinavian making love to her in a perfumed bedroom on a lonely island in the midst of a turbulent sea. Then it is her turn. She spins around, and, perhaps with less tenderness than the poor fellow might have expected, claps her hands over his eyes, and yells in his ear, 'What is the nearest competitive tender to our own for the delivery of one thousand tons of rice to the refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border?'

But there was another side to Yvette that friends, and foreign journalists particularly, ignored at their peril. War, as she was the first to admit, turned her on. She savoured danger, rejoiced in it. The drumbeat of gunfire drew her outside like rain after a drought. Much as she deplored war's miseries, she relished its freedoms and its hazards. They spoke to the rebel in her, the adventuress, the gamine. They consoled the adolescent waif who, reduced to starvation, had walked the streets of Paris and borne a love child to a man who had deserted her. War, the great leveller, quelled the ogres that haunted her from her childhood years of poverty and abuse. It was in Cambodia that she discovered its fearful attractions, and they never let her go.

By the mid-70s, Cambodia was an archipelago. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge held the countryside, while Lon Nol, with vast American support, clung to the towns - the largest of which, Phnom Penh, was ringed by the Khmer Rouge in a radius of five to 10 kilometres from the centre. The wealthier journalists stayed mostly at one big old hotel with gardens and a swimming pool, and took taxis to the front for 30 bucks a day, rising according to the distance travelled and the hazards they might endure on the way. In the evenings, they filed their stories, which scarcely changed: it was the waiting time. One day, in the company of David Greenway, then of the Washington Post , I timorously set out for the battle zone, taking with me for protection a wad of plain postcards on which I habitually made notes, usually afterward illegible, and, of course, the secret persona of my fictional journalist, Jerry. Yvette was determined to join us. She had heard of a wise woman capable of amazing predictions who lived in a Khmer village a few miles into the jungle. Greenway was less than keen, and I was too ignorant to know whether to be keen or not, but when Yvette was determined to have her way there wasn't much you could do about it. As our only Khmer speaker, she gave the driver instructions. We drove for an age. The road was a dead-straight canyon cut through mile-high teak trees. Tropical rain was falling in sheets. Through the teeming windscreen, we saw a sinister brown lorry roll out of the jungle in front of us. It stopped, blocking our way. Two boys with guns dismounted, inspected us, and returned to the lorry, which rolled back to let us pass. We were not the quarry they were waiting for. Abandoning our search, we returned to Phnom Penh. I was still shaking when we reached the hotel, and even Greenway looked a little sallow. But Yvette was in a state of grace. She had touched the high mark. She had lived another day.

Suisindo owned a couple of clapped-out twin-engined cargo planes for shipping goods from town to town. With Yvette and a Chinese pilot, I flew the delivery round: Battambang, Kampong Chom, and I forget where else. In every town we visited - in every street, it seemed to me - Mme Yvette was a patron saint, the adoptive mother of delighted children, the quiet friend of the bereaved, the bringer of hope and courage, as well as goodies. But what I remember most clearly is returning to Phnom Penh at night, to land on a bomb- pitted, unlit runway while the city winced with gunfire. I was never quite sure what we carried on that plane, and I don't think Yvette knew, either. But I know that while the plane was slaloming between craters, and I was praying to whatever divinity came fleetingly to mind, Yvette was laughing like a child at a fireworks party.

Phnom Penh fell, and Suisindo with it. Kurt and Yvette moved to Bangkok and tried to start up again. Kurt died, the business ran into problems, and not even the poor Scandinavian on his island could save it. Yvette consigned the business to a manager and headed for Europe, determined to give the rest of her life to the deprived peoples of the world. And, because she was Yvette, that was very soon exactly what she was doing. Inevitably, the wars drew her. Guatemala and Nicaragua; Bolivia and Colombia; the vilest corners of Africa; and most recently Albania. Sometimes she worked for her own relief organisation, which she called 'Project Tomorrow'. It came as no surprise to any of her friends and backers to learn that she could lobby for support like nobody else on earth. She caught the eye of Mme Mitterrand, and more funds flowed. But, increasingly, she was used by bigger aid outfits, which valued her stamina and fearlessness, her growing expertise, and her determination to go, if necessary alone, where few others would dare.

While Yvette was on the trail, it was her pleasure to write or telephone from outlandish places, preferably with outlandish news. When you talked to her in those situations, you listened for other things: Is she all right? Is she ill? Is she in captivity? Am I supposed to be hearing something I can't hear? There is a tribal chief in the Congo who has read your last book and doesn't like it, she might say, or this fortune-teller in Somalia has predicted the imminent collapse of the royal House of Windsor. She never knew what time of day or night it was in England, or if she did she never cared. She assumed that my wife and I would be pleased to hear from her at any hour; and of course we were. A couple of times she came to stay with us in Cornwall, where we spend most of our year. When a deal she had struck in Thailand unexpectedly bore fruit, she bought a pretty little farmhouse near Uzès, in the south of France, which was where she had decided to put down her roots. Somehow, between whiles, she contrived to be a marvellous mother of two children .

Two days after I arrived in Kenya to look for my new novel - while it was still at the earliest stages of invention, and the nature of my character Justin's bereavement was still a bit of a puzzle to me - Yvette died in Albania, killed in a car accident, together with David and Penny McCall, of Refugees International, and the Albanian driver, while they were on their way to bring practical comfort to a fresh wave of refugees from Kosovo. In foul weather, their car had driven over a mountain pass and fallen several hundred feet. She was 61. Her ashes were buried with both Christian and Buddhist rites in the garden of her farmhouse. Friends came from America, Cambodia, and Thailand to embrace one another in the afternoon sunlight, to stand alone or in pairs at her graveside. Her two children, grown up and well settled, bore themselves with great dignity. It was the most moving funeral that my wife and I have ever attended. In Washington, you may visit the McCall/Pierpaoli Building. It houses the cause Yvette died for: Refugees International.

And this is where the story becomes disconcerting, even a little unnerving. This is where we touch on the mystical part of Yvette - I know no other word for it - on her calm, accepting attitude toward the forces that she believed commanded her, on her conviction that certain things in her life were ordained, and that by obeying her inmost instincts and reading the signs and following their instructions she was fulfilling her purpose on earth. She wasn't spooky about it, or boastful. She didn't force it down your throat. But she was sure. Even the most sceptical among us - count me as one of them - would have to admit that destiny or fate or simply outrageous coincidence played an extraordinary and persistent part in her life. You didn't have to share her beliefs in transcendentalism or telepathy, but, when it came to explaining the things that happened to her, it helped.

A few years back, she had taken a sabbatical to write her autobiography - it was published in France, Germany, and Italy, but an English version, for some reason, never appeared, even though, for a while, Julie Andrews was planning to play her in a movie. Impatient as ever, Yvette kept faxing me passages for immediate comment. She wrote with flair and frankness and great speed. She had no formal education, but she had read a fair amount, and just as she assimilated languages so she took naturally to the pen. But there was a problem. Her insistence that she was a child of destiny scared the professional writer in me, and I urged her to tone it down. Her life was exotic enough on its own, I argued. She told a tale of love and courage and endurance and vocation - what more did she want? She was a woman of the people, not the gods. Did she really have to attribute her achievements to spiritual guidance and the power of meditation? Might she not be setting herself apart from readers who did not share her spirituality? And so on.

Finally, in desperation, I put it to her that she might be risking sales. This appeal to the businessman in her promptly had its effect. Today, I rather wish I had let her write as she believed.

Let me throw in a disclaimer here. I am not trying to talk up my novel with presumptuous claim about its genesis. I am trying to trace the origins of a book that anticipated the events - ahead of their occurrence - that provided it with its motivation. The point being - though it makes my toes curl to admit it - that months before I heard of Yvette's fatal accident I had been contemplating as my offstage central character a woman who had become passionately involved in aid work in Africa, and was dead by the time the story opened. In other words, I was calling Yvette Tessa, and mourning her death ahead of the fact.

And Yvette was aware of what I was up to. I did not reveal to her, so far as I remember, that I proposed to murder Tessa by the time the story opened. But I certainly told her that I intended to use the backdrop of Africa, and that my heroine was somebody as impossible as herself - a notion she received with joy, but also with some scepticism since she knew very well she was unique. And we were going to meet, and she was going to brief me, probably as soon as I had completed my first field trip. She needed to come to Cornwall again, preferably in a big storm. Why had she never experienced a big Cornish storm? she demanded, as if we had somehow failed as hosts. We had already talked about the African friends I must meet, and most of them, predictably, were in the nastiest places. With Yvette, you expected that and, deep down, you wanted it.

And though by age, occupation, nationality, and birth my Tessa was far removed from Yvette, Tessa's commitment to the poor of Africa, particularly its women, her contempt for protocol, and her unswerving, often maddening determination to have her way stemmed quite consciously so far as I was concerned, from Yvette's example. Yvette, like almost no one else, had opened my eyes to constructive compassion, to putting your money and your life where your heart was, and I was not alone in this. Many of the men and women who embraced one another at the ceremony in the garden of her French farmhouse would have said the same. It was Yvette's work, I now realise, that I wished to celebrate when I embarked on the novel. Probably I realised it from the start, whenever the start was. Probably she did. Yet the novel's motor is her death, in the fiction and afterward in the fact. And it was Yvette's presence that, from the moment of her death, steered me through the book. To all of which Yvette would say, 'Of course.'
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