Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Shantaram is a journey through the life of a convict on the lam, a slum dweller, a prisoner in a crowded Indian jail, a de facto combat medic in the Soviet-Afghan War, and a Bombay gangster. The book is a novel, but mixes in autobiographical elements—at least in broad brush strokes. The author, Gregory David Roberts, was—as with his lead character–an escaped convict who fled his homeland of Australia to find anonymity among the Bombay (now Mumbai) masses. Roberts had taken up armed robbery of banks and institutions to support a heroine habit. However, it’s not clear to what degree the details described in the book echo reality. Roberts is adamant that the other characters in the book are completely fictional, but at least some members of this cast were recognizable as real people—some of whom disagree with the accounting of events in the book.

Most of the book is set in Bombay in the 1980s, and for many the book serves as portrait of the good, the bad, and the ugly of that city. The book picks up with the lead character’s arrival in Bombay, where the gregarious convict soon makes equally vibrant friends. There’s very little backstory, except for one chapter that details the protagonist’s escape from prison. There are occasional mentions of his heroin addiction and crimes peppered throughout the book—often delivered in doleful or apologetic moments. Also, he occasionally mentions the family that is missing in Australia—particularly a daughter—usually when the close nature of Indian familial relationships remind him of what he’s missing. This vague background makes sense as this was supposed to be book two in a quartet. Another book is supposed to be coming out called The Mountain Shadow, that I suspect would be the third book of this quartet.

The book excels at creating characters that are multidimensional in the extreme, but who one still finds engaging. The protagonist and several major characters should be unbelievable, given the degree to which they mix virtue and vice, cynicism and idealism. However, maybe they reflect human nature more than we’d like to admit.

Consider the protagonist. He is called “Shantaram” by the family of his best friend in Bombay. Shantaram means “man of peace,” and that’s supposedly what those characters saw in him, but he’s also a man of violence—by his own admission. He’s stabbed, beaten, and shot at other people, and continues to do so. It’s not just the lead character who is like this. It’s the same for his love interest, his gangster friends, his Mujahedeen friends, and his fellow prisoners. Many of them are anti-heroes, and others vacillate between hero and villain. “Doing the wrong thing for the right reason,” is a recurring theme throughout the book.

It should be noted that the anti-hero characters are also the source of loathing for those who hate the book—and there are those who hate it. It’s not just the frequent and raw violence from the “man of God’s peace,” but how the book glorifies gangsters—at least some gangsters.

There was one feature of the book that made this acceptable to me, and that’s that the character knows he’s flawed. As with any veiled autobiographical book, there’s probably some dancing events around to make the characters look more reasonable and likable than they really were. However, Shantaram does admit his mistakes and flaws. One can see how an element of self-loathing plays into these people’s behavior. The virtuous half of Shantaram can be seen as a desire for redemption.

One of the best encapsulations of his self-loathing is when Shantaram gets a promotion in the Bombay mafia, and he tries to recruit a couple of his friends from the slum. He is shocked to find that they would rather stay slum-dwellers who eke out an existence than to make good money breaking the law—even if only as document couriers (the documents being fake passports and the like.) [To be honest but non-PC, if you think Roberts glorifies gangsters, you should see how he glorifies slum-dwellers.] Shantaram also envies a man who refuses assistance to get his sentence reduced after the virtuous slum-dweller killed a horrible person in the heat of passion. In both of these cases, he has a “who must I be?” moment. Maybe that’s why we believe that this ex-junkie mobster would set up a free clinic in the slum or help his friends without question, he’s in a constant search for redemption. It could be said that the engine of this book is the search for redemption, but it’s a Promethean task because Shantaram keeps accruing karmic penalties in his tight-rope walk between good and evil—or maybe a damaged moral compass.

The book weighs in at almost a thousand pages, but it does a good job of keeping one reading. There many exhilarating and tragic events to keep one turning pages such as a fight against a cholera outbreak in the slum, torture in a Bombay prison, taking fire in the mountains of Afghanistan, the deaths of close friends, and fighting turf wars between factions of the Bombay mafia. However, the glue that binds all those climactic points together is the tension created by the various relationships from the expat community to the slums to the Mumbai mob.

Love it or loathe it, Shantaram is a powerful book. I define “powerful” as attracting love and hate at the extreme. This isn’t a book one feels indifferent about. I’d recommend it for a general audience.

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