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A novel with some relevance

Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 1:18 am
by JFH
So here's a novel that might appeal to members of This is MS: John le Carré, The Constant Gardener. Amazon has a snappy review:
British diplomat Justin Quayle, complacent raiser of freesias and doting husband of the stunning, much younger Tessa, has tended his own garden in Nairobi too long. Tessa is Justin's opposite, a fiery reformer, "that rarest thing, a lawyer who believes in justice," whose campaigns have earned her a nickname: "the Princess Diana of the African poor." But now Tessa has turned up naked, raped, and dead on a mysterious visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. Her traveling companion (and lover?), the handsome Congolese-Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, has vanished. So has Quayle's complacency.

Tessa had been compiling data against a multinational drug company that uses helpless Africans as guinea pigs to test a tuberculosis remedy with unfortunately fatal side effects. Her report was destroyed by her husband's superiors; was she? It's all somehow connected to the sinister British firm House of ThreeBees, whose ad boasts that it's "buzzy for the health of Africa!" John le Carré symbolically associates ThreeBees with an ominous buzz in the Nairobi morgue: "Over [the corpses], in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note."

The home office tries to take Quayle in out of the cold. He cleverly eludes their clammy embrace, turns spy, and takes off on a global chase to avenge Tessa and solve her murder. Le Carré has lost none of his gift for setting vivid scenes in far-flung places expertly described: London, Germany, Saskatchewan, Kenya. His sprinting thriller prose remains in great shape. And thanks to his 16 years in the British Foreign Office, his merciless send-up of its cutthroat intrigues and petty self-delusions is unbelievably good--or rather, believably so. This is global do-gooder satire on a literary par with Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark.

But you want to know if The Constant Gardener is as good as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Very nearly. Africa's nightmare is more complex than the cold war chess match, and the world pharmaceutical circus is tougher to dramatize than the old spy-versus-spy-versus-spymaster game. Still, le Carré can write a smart, melancholy page-turner, and his moral outrage (the real subject of his books) burns as brightly as ever. --Tim Appelo
Just how does a pharma co get FDA approval, and the consquent cashflow for its new wonder drug? If you're a researcher when and how should you take the pharma co's shilling?

le Carré writes from an increasingly radical viewpoint, but not unfairly or
dogmatically. If you like this book you'll probably like the more recent Absolute Friends as well.

Enjoy - i did :D

Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/st ... 4229107299Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASI ... 68-1498233
PS. Anyone following the recent (Oct '04) pubilicty about the recall of HM Ambassador to Uzbekistan (he complained of intelligence being obtained under torture) might even see some echoes of fact following fiction.

Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 3:39 am
by Niko
John,

Thanks for posting that. It sounds like a very good read. I will add it to my reading list and pick it up the next time I go book shopping!

Cheers,

Niko 8)

Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 1:10 pm
by OddDuck
Well, I'll be! I rarely visit this particular forum, but today I did, and frankly, that DOES sound like a good book!!
Just how does a pharma co get FDA approval, and the consquent cashflow for its new wonder drug? If you're a researcher when and how should you take the pharma co's shilling?
Great questions, John! (I know these were more or less rhetorical questions, but it might be a fun exercise to try to answer.) Philosophically and hypothetically speaking, a pharma company gets FDA approval once their "studies" show efficacy (but who knows what the definition of "efficacy" is and how it is "presented", OR how many studies it takes before you get one that can be presented in such a way as to be able to obtain FDA approval - ah, does that have a hint of a conspiracy theory behind it? hehehe....) And the cash flow? Well, from as many avenues as possible! HAH!

If you're a researcher, you take the pharma company's shilling when you don't have the money yourself to invest, and don't have enough new "theories" to apply for grant fund money, or you don't have adequate access to sophisticated laboratory facilities; and how you take the pharma company's money is by protecting yourself first business-wise (there are some complex methods, but they work). :wink: JUST in case you accidentally get aligned with a corrupt company. Which probably happens rarely, but you never know!

:wink:

Deb