Quayle's pursuit of the truth takes him from Kenya to London to Italy to Switzerland to Canada and then back to Kenya, tracking down each witness, interviewing each morally compromised character. "With three golden bees embroidered on the pocket of each coat, he might have added, but his resolve held him back." If he does not tell them, we know it must be important.
Later, when Quayle is being interrogated by the British police officers investigating the murder, he too mentions white-coated attendants, but withholds something. Woodrow, a man who prefers the quiet life, knows that something wrong is going on in that hospital. "His eyes, round with hurt, are haunted by a horror that both men seem to share." The news of Tessa Quayle's murder makes him remember visiting her in hospital and seeing a mysterious man in a white coat, arguing with Bluhm, her fellow campaigner against the depredations of the giant pharmaceutical companies. Initially, in The Constant Gardener, we know there is a plot because Woodrow does. (Just look at Dickens's plans for the monthly parts of his novels.) In Le Carré novels, the characters themselves sense plots. If plot is paramount, a novelist must foresee the end before finalising the beginning. It will turn out to be intimately connected to Tessa's murder. In The Constant Gardener, for example, there is the ubiquitous presence of the Three Bees company, its products oddly noticed in passing. A plot has clues or hints in one part of the narrative that something will be explained in another. We discover the plot as we read, so the plot-driven author must conceal connections as well as eventually reveal them. We sometimes talk of a plot being "unravelled", for it is the causal chain that connects events and characters. Le Carré might have chosen to begin with Tessa and Justin's first meeting (this episode is narrated later, in wistful retrospect). The same story might be narrated in different ways. Describing Le Carré's narrative involves explaining that Tessa, Justin's wife, is dead on the novel's first page, and that everything we see or hear of her - including passages of quoted dialogue - is given in flashback in the thoughts of other characters.
The "narrative" is the way that a story is told. He is thus drawn into his wife's investigations and discovers what she was trying to expose. The bereaved husband tries to track down those responsible for the murder. Put simply, The Constant Gardener is the story of a minor diplomat, Justin Quayle, whose young, idealistic wife is murdered because of her investigations into pharmaceutical experiments on Africans. We can think of a novel's "story" as the material of its events and characters - what happens in it. It is useful, in fact, to distinguish between "plot", "narrative" and "story". Novels like Le Carré's, which require their protagonists, as well as their readers, to connect disconnected events, are specifically inviting us to read for the plot. Some novels are not much interested in plot. Yet not all novels require us to uncover some hidden design.
D oes every novel have a plot? Colloquially we use the word as if it were synonymous with "story" or "narrative".
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