Andrew Smith's Reviews > Shantaram

Let's get this straight from the start: according to the author, this book is based on real events, but it’s a novel, a work of fiction – not an autobiography. And that’s ok, except as this book is clearly based heavily on the author’s life, I couldn't help asking myself where exactly in this tale is the fact and where is the fiction? It did make for a strange experience.

Anyway, some known facts about Gregory David Roberts:

- An self confessed heroin addict, in 1978 he was sentenced to 19 years imprisonment for armed robberies carried out to feed his habit.
- He escaped and skipped Australia, leaving a wife and daughter behind, intending to make his way to Europe, but after a stopover in Bombay (Mumbai), he decided to settle in the island city.
- After being befriended by some of the locals, he lived in the Navy Nagar slum for a period and also spent some time living with a family in a remote village.

All of the above feature in the book, and a good deal more too. The adventures include coping with a cholera epidemic, joining the local mafia, and teaming up with the Afghan Mujahedeen to fight the might of the Soviet forces. It’s an epic tale that takes up a wrist busting 900 plus pages, or in my case, over 42 hours of audio. I have to say that Humphrey Bower brilliantly read the audio version - he brought the characters to life, and his accents were, on the whole, expertly handled.

There’s much more to the book than the facts I've listed above, although these do provide the basic structure for the story. I'm still trying to fully process how I feel about this one, but I know there are things I loved about it and other elements that created significant misgivings.

On the upside, the descriptions of India and its people are fantastic. Life in the city and in the small village is graphically portrayed, and I really felt I was living these sections. Some of the characters were exceptional – I particularly loved Prabhaker, Didier, Vicram, and the scarily insane Habib. I don't want to give anything away but I will say there are scenes that left me variously laughing out loud, desperately sad and/or pretty much revolted and scared witless – the latter particularly coming to the fore when our hero was temporarily incarcerated in Bombay’s Arthur Road Jail. It's a book that really does stretch the emotions. I also enjoyed the way the underlying themes of freedom, loyalty, love (lots of love), and betrayal played out through the narrative.

It’s the way the facts are brought together that really causes me to have doubts. There is a huge amount of self-aggrandisement in the way the lead character, who adopts the alias of Lindsay Ford (Lin), is portrayed. The language throughout is flowery in the extreme, and the text is liberally sprinkled with hackneyed phrases, clichés and truisms. But the overriding flaw here is that this fictional text, written in the first person, reads like the autobiography it isn't. It confused my emotions: I wanted to admire Roberts/Lin and marvel at the acts of heroism and charity, but I couldn't. My final criticism is that it feels like a book that needed a good editor: it's way too long, and I felt that some sections dragged on interminably.

Overall, I don't regret the time I invested in this book. Despite the doubts I’ve expressed, I did find it very entertaining, and I feel I learnt a good deal about India and its people. I might even be persuaded to seek out the follow-up book that's kicking around now… we’ll see.