I remember when I heard the first song on Desire, Bob Dylan’s 1976 album.
It was Hurricane. His previous albums, New Morning, Dylan, Planet Waves and Blood On The Tracks, had been mainly albums of personal songs, essentially about himself and his relationships. But by
writing Hurricane and taking up the
cause of Rubin Carter, the boxer who had been jailed, and Dylan believed
framed, for murder Dylan’s righteous indignation was reignited. The song sears, his voice rasps and his
artistry sours. Carter’s
conviction was eventually overturned, but that was 1986, and he could no longer
stood a chance to ‘be the champion of the
world’. Dylan’s anger made my heart
soar.
When I first read John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener in
2001 my heart rose and sank at the same
time. It rose because it seemed that le
Carré had also got his righteous
mojo back - and anger improved his art too. When
the Cold War ended David Cornwell (le Carré did not just lose a context, he lost a
passion. It was never simply an anti-Soviet passion; he
was angry about the way the whole international Intelligence world operated on
behalf of its governments, including of course his own.
But in The
Constant Gardener David Cornwell/ le Carré had found something new to be
angry about. A former SIS man, Ted Younie, had told him
about the ways Big Pharma used Africans as guinea pigs and falsified their
clinical trials. ‘This book needs
writing’ Younie had told Cornwell.
In his 2015 biography of Cornwell/ le Carré Adam
Sisman wrote that ‘The more that David
investigated the behavior of drug companies in Africa, the more outraged he
became. They dumped inappropriate or
out-of-date medicines on the Africans, suppressed information about their
contra-indications and their side-effects, and encouraged their indiscriminate
use. The most effective drugs were
arbitrarily over-priced, and attempts to manufacture generic substitutes
blocked.’ (p533)
Cornwell was also ‘shocked to discover how closely the industry was tied to Western
Governments, and ‘David believed it possible that in extremis
the most unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies
might to murder to silence their critics’. (ibid).
Cornwell has always taken his research
seriously, often putting his own safety at risk. He went to Kenya to research this issue, also
flying into South Sudan, an area
devastated by drought, famine and civil war (the first ‘water war’?). He talked there to members of the United
Nations Operation Lifeline Sudan, and to local dignitaries and officials. While at
a food station it was attacked by the
mounted Janjaweed fighters and he was evacuated, along with the aid workers, to
a nearby island.
The
Constant Gardener is an unashamedly campaigning
novel. Some critics faulted it for
this, but Dickens, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn,
James Baldwin and many others have written such committed books. Surely it is a legitimate use of the form? Be that as it may, it was Cornwell’s
informed indictment of Big Pharma that made my heart sink, just as it was meant
to.
In 1974, while researching The
Honourable Schoolboy in Cambodia he had met a Frenchwoman, Yvette
Pierpaoli, who ran a trading company mainly used to fly relief operations to
refugees, many of them in besieged towns.
Cornwell flew with her, and saw that she was greeted there as a savior
and saint, a friend who brought them hope as well as food.
‘She
had all the wiles’ Cornwell wrote, ‘She
could spread her elbows and upbraid you like a bargee. She could tip you with a smile to melt your
heart, cajole, flatter, and win you in any way you needed to be won.’ Yvette eventually became the model for
Tessa Quayle, the heroine and wife of Justin, The Constant Gardener, and the portrayal of her ‘commitment to the poor of Africa,
especially its women, her contempt for protocol, and her unswerving, often
maddening, determination to have her way’
stemmed from Yvette’s example.
He had only been in Kenya for a few days when his wife Jane called him to say that Yvette had died
in a car accident. The Constant Gardener is dedicated; ‘For
Yvette Pierpaoli, who lived and died giving a damn.’ So
is the film that followed.
When the movie came out I watched it
course, and was impressed. I watched it
again last night, and was no less
impressed. The producer, Simon Channing
Williams had been brave enough to engage
the Brazilian Fernando Meirrelles as Director,
following on from his City of God and Blindness, and Meirrelles brought in his own cinematographer
from both of those films, the Uruguayan Cesar
Charlene. The work they had done
together in the barrios of Rio
Janeiro, with hand help cameras and using crowds of local people, was utilized
again shooting in Nairobi, where up to a million people lived in slums, without
clean water or electricity.
Cornwell worked extensively with the
British screen-writer, Jeffrey Caine, for two years. He later said ‘There’s hardly a line left, hardly a scene intact that comes from my
novel. Yet I don’t know a better
translation from film to novel.’
(Sisman p540).
Casting was crucial. Rachel Weisz, as Tessa, won a Golden Globe
for her performance. Ranulph Fiennes
as Justin Quayle managed to hold our belief in a character who goes through so
many changes, a task made more difficult by the way the story is not told in chronological
order. Danny Huston is also persuasive as a man too
easily led away from his honour and duty.
Some members of the cast and crew later set
up a charity, The Constant Gardener Trust, with Cornwell, Meirelles, Fiennes
and Weisz as patrons, providing access
to clean water and toilets in parts of the Nairobi slums and funding a
secondary school in Loiyangalani on the
bank of Lake Turkana, where some of the film was shot.
In an afterword to the novel Cornwell wrote
‘As my journey through the pharmaceutical
jungle progressed I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my
story was as tame as a holiday postcard.’
Have things changed since?
The fictional plot
about a corrupt drug company touting a supposed cure for tuberculosis (TB)
anticipates the more recent lawsuit brought by the Nigerian Government against
Pfizer for $7 bn alleging that an experimental antibiotic to treat meningitis
led to death and disability in a group of children.
For a
more recent view I refer you to Dylan Mohan Gray’s 2013 documentary Fire In The Blood ‘ an intricate tale of "medicine, monopoly and
malice". It tells the story of how
Western pharmaceutical companies and governments blocked access to low-cost
AIDS drugs for the countries of the global south in the years after 1996 -
causing ten million or more unnecessary deaths - and the improbable group of
people who decided to fight back. Shot on four continents and including
contributions from global figures such as Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Joseph
Stiglitz, Fire In The Blood is the never-before-told true story of the remarkable
coalition which came together to stop 'the crime of the century' and save
millions of lives in the process. (IMdb)
This film also told the story of a well-known
South African judge, Edwin Cameron, who was near death from
AIDS in the mid-‘90s but survived. He understands
that this was because he is a white man with a first world-scale salary, who
could afford the expensive patent-protected drugs made by Big Pharma companies
like GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb that gave him his life back. He’s also a resident of the continent where
people who could not afford to pay thousands of dollars for those drugs have
died on a nearly unbelievable scale.
By some reputable estimates, 10 million men,
women and children died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa between 1997 and 2003,
when drugs that could have saved their lives already existed and were abundant
in other parts of the world. While Cameron was receiving medicine, poor people
who lived a few miles away from him in the South African townships were told to
go home and die. This happened entirely because the drug companies decided that
protecting their bottom-line profits was more important than saving lives, and
because there was no moral force with the global power to stop them. To put
those 10 million deaths in perspective, almost 15 times as many people died of
AIDS in Africa during that period than have died in the United States over the entire 32-year history of the
epidemic.
Allowing less expensive versions to be
manufactured and sold in the developing world would have involved a tacit
admission that the entire price structure was an extortionate fiction. As early as the year 2000, Indian
pharmaceutical entrepreneur Yusuf Hamied offered to supply generic versions of
antiretroviral medications to African countries at a cost of $800 per patient
per year, about 5 percent of the price charged in the West. Even though the Big Pharma companies sold
almost no patented drugs in Africa and had no profits to lose in those
countries by permitting generics, they still refused. Hamied would later lower his price to $350 a
year, less than a dollar a day, which was when things started to change.
I now read drug companies slaverin over he
vast profits to be mae by aellinf their stuff to the growing monied African
middle class.
On a positive note, the popularity of both
book and film of The Constant Gardener
helped, we are told, to raise consciousness of the Pharma’s bad behavior in
Africa, and help the cause of those campaigning in the UN for change.
Where does The Constant Gardener fit in the
le Carré canon? It is not up their with The Spy who Came In From The Cold or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,
but I do think it was a turnin point in his subsequent career.
After the ‘fall of the Wall’ Cornwell/ le Carré wrote Our Game, (1995) concerned with, among other
things, the nationalist chaos in the
Caucasus that followed Soviet disintegration,
(there was some passion there),
The Night Manager, (1993) was essentially a
thriller about the illegal (but unofficially tolerated) arms trade, recently
updated and made into a BBC 6 part series.
The Tailor of Panama, (1996) almost a Graham
Greene ‘entertainment’, filmed in 2001 by John Boorman,
Single
& Single
(1998) was a complex reworking of
his complex relationship with his con-man father.
But after The Constant Gardener (2001) came; ,
Absolute
Friends, (2003)
linking globalisation and terrorism,
The
Mission Song, (2006) a much more focused book about
Western interests exploiting The Congo and Rwanda,
A
Most Wanted Man (2008, well filmed in 2011 by Anton
Corbijn, with Philip Seymour Hoffman in his final role) raging
against ‘extraordinary extradition’ and
the over-arching power of the US,
Our
Kind of Traitor (2010) about post-Soviet gangster capitalism,
and A
Delicate Truth, (2013) of which the Kirkus Review remarked that le Carré "resolutely keeping potential action
sequences just offstage," and
"focuses instead on the moral rot and creeping terror barely concealed by
the affable old-boy blather that marks the pillars of the intelligence
community."
That
moral rot has been a semi-constant motif, and I think the central cause of
Cornwell’s ongoing anger. As an
ex-spy he well knows that you cannot trust spies, even when they are on your
side, when seem to behave like Honourable Schoolboys or when you are
their Absolute Friend. Like The
Secret Pilgrim he knows that his own ethical standards and patriotic
loyalty have been too often compromised and betrayed by those in power, both
those unelected ‘officers’ of MI5 and MI6 and the politicians seduced by them
when offered the lie that they have been ‘let in to the secret circles’.
I have written another article (Blind and bigoted) about the way The Constant Gardener film was entirely
misused to illustrate a racist, even eugenicist, article written by an American
retired professor.
As a footnote, it strikes me as odd that
two films starring Fiennes, The Constant
Gardener and The English Patient (1996), start with a dead woman, beloved of Fiennes’ character, and in both we
have to wait until the end to see how
her life and his actually ended.
Having revisited both movies I comment you
to do the same.
