2006考研英语命题预测题四

Section Ⅱ Reading Comprehension

Part A

TEXT 1

    "The news hit the British High Commission in Nairobi at nine-thirty on a Monday morning. Sandy Woodrow took it like a bullet, jaw rigid, chest out, smack through his divided English heart." Crikey. So that's how you take a bullet. Poor old Sandy. His English heart must be really divided now. This deliriously hardboiled opening sets the tone for what's to come. White mischief? Pshaw! White plague, more like it.

    Sandy Woodrow is head of chancery at the British High Commission in Nairobi. The news that neatly subdivides his heart as the novel opens is the death of a young, beautiful and idealistic lawyer turned aid worker named Tessa Quayle. Tessa has been murdered for learning too much about the unscrupulous practices of a large pharmaceutical company operating in Africa. Her body is found at Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya near the border with Sudan. Tessa's husband, Justin, is also a British diplomat stationed in Nairobi. Until now Justin has been an obedient civil servant, content to toe the official line-in short, a plodder. But all that changes in the after math of his wife's murder. Full of righteous indignation, he resolves to get to the bottom of it, come what may.

    There's nothing wrong with a bit of artistic license, of course. But Mr. le Carre's equivocation about the novel's relation to fact undermines its effectiveness as a work of social criticism, which is pretty clearly what it aspires to be. "The Constant Gardener" is a cracking thriller but a flawed exploration of a complicated set of political issues.