The novel tells the story of Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose activist wife is murdered. (Look for Harold Pinter’s bit part as the ghost of Harry Pendel’s con-man Uncle Benny.The Constant Gardener is a 2001 novel by British author John le Carré. As with Constant Gardener, the ending is sanitized but very sly nonetheless. Geoffrey Rush is a marvel as Harry Pendel, channeling a bumbling, working-class vein of comedy derived from the yuk-factory of England’s Ealing Studios in the ’40s and ’50s. Brosnan plays to his strengths, wringing every bit of slimy hucksterism out of his character’s rather blunt lexicon. Pierce Brosnan is a smart choice, a sexier, more Byronic version of Andy Osnard, the novel’s stout and semidisgraced agent whom the Circus has exiled to one of Britain’s less tony embassies. The former seemed to fade from memory amid the critical glow that greeted The Constant Gardener-a shame, since Boorman nails nearly everything in adapting le Carré’s most overt satire. In this century, le Carré has exercised increasing control over adaptations of the novels, serving as executive producer on John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama (2001) and Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011). Even that dismal final sequence (in which bent bureaucrats get a measure of comeuppance) in director Fernando Meirelles’ wonderful The Constant Gardener (2005) is a game of cricket compared with the book.
Most of the novels end, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, with “a conclusion in which nothing is concluded,” or else in something approaching tragedy. Le Carré’s plots, meanwhile, stymie certain easy conventions of the cinema of espionage his novels may not be as “unfilmable” as Tristram Shandy, but the challenges remain steep. Christie was an enormous commercial success as a playwright, and her novels move with the rhythms of film, and the screenwriter’s work is therefore quite simple.
(As it happens, 23 is also the number of extant James Bond movies.) This modest smattering of le Carré adaptations makes a certain sense. About half of Agatha Christie’s 66 mystery novels received a film treatment, whereas only eight of John le Carré’s 23 novels have made it to the big screen.
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