I
thought this was an autobiography, but according to the Australian author it is
a novel influenced by real events in his life. In 1978, Roberts was sentenced to
19-year imprisonment in Australia after being convicted of a series of armed
robberies of building societies, credit unions and shops. In July 1980, he
escaped from Victoria’s Pentridge Prison in broad daylight, thereby becoming one
of Australia's most wanted men for the next ten years.
The
protagonist Lindsay (according to the book, Roberts' fake name) arrives in
Mumbai carrying a false passport in the name of Lindsay Ford. Mumbai was
supposed to be only a stopover as he planned to go to Germany. However he
decides to stay in the city.
One day he is robbed and with all his possessions
gone, Lin is forced to live in the slums which shelters him from the
authorities. He grows fond of the slum dwellers and sets up a free health clinic
as a way to contribute to the community. I particularly enjoyed this part of the
book and the descriptions of the health care, stench, rats, feral dogs and how
the close knit community dealt with fire and cholera and their day to day
struggle to survive.
The author describes the rich diversity of people he
meets in Mumbai with the different lifestyles, culture and customs, the huge
disparity between the rich and poor, the corruption and squalor. He tells of
various criminal operations he is involved with after his recruitment into the
Mumbai underworld and the traumatic time he spent in Mumbai’s notorious Arthur
Road Prison where he suffered brutal physical abuse and starvation. Once
released from prison he gets involved in smuggling weapons into Afghanistan for
the mujahideen freedom fighters. There are so many instances in the book where
Lin is badly beaten up, shot, stabbed and tortured it seems impossible for a
body to sustain such injuries and survive. I’m surprised he had a functioning
body left. It seems incredible that a person could survive such horrendous
violence and not be totally disabled physically, mentally and
emotionally.
It’s things like this that make it hard to get my
head around how I feel about this book.I have recommended it to loads of people
because for me it is a memorable read and a page turner. I preferred the first
half, I enjoyed the author’s humour and grew very fond of some of the characters
in the book.
I
really felt I was in India although incidentally I have never had a desire to
visit the country and nothing could entice me to go there having read the book.
Roberts has stated the characters in the story are largely invented, and that he
merged different elements taken from true events and people into the plot and
characters in the book. It’s impossible to know where the boundaries lie between
fact and fiction, either way, it sounds pretty grim.
I
didn’t like the the criminal activities Lin got involved in, he was a
counterfeiter, smuggler, gun runner and street soldier for the Bombay mafia. I
found it all pretty sordid and distasteful and don’t see how he could justify
his activities especially the horrendous violence and murders he or his mafia
colleagues perpetrated. He says he never killed anyone - but he didn’t seem to
balk at stabbing and beating or kicking people half to death. It often seemed
like he was boasting about being a hard man and the fear the gangsters instilled
as they swaggered around.
In
1990, in real life, not recorded in the book, Roberts was captured in Frankfurt
after being caught smuggling heroin into the country. He was extradited to
Australia and served a further six years in prison, two of which were spent in
solitary confinement. During his second stay in Australian prison, Roberts began
writing the novel Shantaram. He claims the manuscript was destroyed by
prison wardens, twice, while Roberts was writing it.
On
completing his prison sentence, Roberts established a small multi-media company
and was finally reunited with his daughter. He is now a full-time writer living
in Melbourne. Since then Roberts has lived in Melbourne, Germany and France. He
returned to Mumbai where he set up charitable foundations to assist the city's
poor with health care coverage. He got engaged to Francoise Sturdza, who is the
president of the Hope for India Foundation. You can see images of him on the
internet. So he seems to have turned over a new leaf, putting his talents,
energy and intelligence to good use including helping the impoverished and
vulnerable of India - hopefully that’s true.
I
had a certain sympathy with one reviewer’s moan which was:
The author's relentlessly inflated opinion of
himself. Every other page we're meant to be in awe of the fact he learnt some of
the local languages, and is therefore the most amazing Westerner to have ever
visited India. Ever. (And every Indian thinks so too, of course.) As another
reviewer said wearily: Everybody loves Lin. Simple villagers love him, slum
dwellers love him, beautiful ex-prostitutes love him, gangsters love him,
Afghani drug lords love him, taxi drivers always love him at a glance and so on
and so forth. As a character, he's just unbelievable. And that's without getting
into the fact he's absolutely The Best at Everything - from fighting to
lovemaking, medicine to philosophy.
This view point was shared with another couple of
reviewers who wrote:
Every page of this book is about how everyone
loves the author: he is respected by all, is talented at everything, a great
judge of character, all Indians respect him for his superior knowledge and
experience and of course he is fantastic in bed.
and
finally:
Shantaram is written by the type of person that
you would dread getting stuck in a lift with; 'So enough about me. Tell me what
you think of me...'
