Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
St. Martin's Press
944 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312330538
Summary
It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.
So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.
Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.
As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.
Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas—this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love for India at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June, 1952
• Where—Melbourne, Australia
• Education—attended Melbourne University
• Currently—lives in Mumbai (Bombay), India (?)
Gregory David Roberts was born as Gregory John Peter Smith in Melbourne, Australia. An author, he is best known for his novel Shantaram. He is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from Pentridge Prison in 1980, and fled to India where he lived for ten years.
Roberts had become addicted to heroin after his marriage ended, and he lost custody of his young daughter. In his efforts to finance his drug habit, Roberts became known as the "Building Society Bandit" and the "Gentleman Bandit," because he had chosen to rob only institutions with adequate insurance. He would wear a three-piece suit and he always said "please" and "thank you" to the people he robbed. Roberts believed at the time that in this way he was lessening the brutality of his acts, but later in his life he admitted that people only gave him money because he had made them afraid. He escaped from Pentridge Prison in 1980.
In 1990 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. According to Roberts, he escaped prison again during that time, but then he relented and smuggled himself back into jail. His intention was to serve the rest of his sentence to give himself the chance to be reunited with his family. During his second stay in Australian prison, Roberts began writing the novel Shantaram. The manuscript was destroyed by prison wardens, twice, while Roberts was writing it.
After leaving prison, Roberts was able to finally finish and publish his novel. The title Shantaram comes from the name his best friend's mother gave him, which means "Man of Peace," or "Man of God's Peace."
Roberts lived in Melbourne, Germany, and France and finally returned to Mumbai, where he set up charitable foundations to assist the city's poor with health care coverage. He was finally reunited with his daughter. He got engaged to Francoise Sturdza, who is the president of the Hope for India Foundation. Roberts also wrote the original screenplay for the movie adaptation of Shantaram.
In 2009, Roberts was named an Zeitz Foundation Ambassador for Community. Ambassadors help raise awareness and shape activities in their respective dimension. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Shantaram is an exuberant, swashbuckling story of derring-do, told with reckless gusto and obvious affection, and if Roberts is no sort of stylist (and he isn't), you'd have to be a snob not to admit to enjoying yourself.
Patrick Ness - Telegraph (UK)
A gentle giant on the scale of Shantaram can afford a few unintended giggles, but million-rupee questions remain: Why, given Roberts's wealth of material and penchant for soul-searching, didn't he write a memoir? And what of Linbaba's debt to society and, presumably, to his briefly mentioned young daughter back in Australia? What is he really after, anyway? But it seems unsporting to begrudge Roberts the license to thrill while having such a good time —and ''Shantaram,'' mangrove-scented prose and all, is nothing if not entertaining. Sometimes a big story is its own best reward.
Megan O'Grady - New York Times
[A] sprawling, intelligent novel…full of vibrant characters…the exuberance of his prose is refreshing…Roberts brings us through Bombay's slums and opium houses, its prostitution dens and ex-pat bars, saying, You come now. And we follow.
Washington Post
"I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison," says Lin, Gregory David Roberts' hero, on the first page of Shantaram.... The sad truth is that there's little more to be gained by reading the remaining 935 pages. Lin's brutal trek through Afghanistan and its bloody ending turn out to be just another in a shapeless collection of action episodes, strung together by macho ruminations about the nature of love, trust, courage, and, of course, freedom.
Boston Globe
Part travelogue, part love letter, part autobiography, Shantaram is a vivid, entertaining but slightly grandiose tale of Lin, an ex-junkie and convicted robber who escapes from an Australian prison then hides in the most alien of places: the hot, filthy, decadent, seaside metropolis of Bombay.
Rita Bishnoi - USA Today
Shantaram had me hooked from the first sentence. [It] is thrilling, touching, frightening...a glorious wallow of a novel.
Detroit Free Press
Utterly unique, absolutely audacious, and wonderfully wild, Shantaram is sure to catch even the most fantastic of imaginations off guard.
Elle
At the start of this massive, thrillingly undomesticated potboiler, a young Australian man bearing a false New Zealand passport that gives his name as "Lindsay" flies to Bombay some time in the early '80s. On his first day there, Lindsay meets the two people who will largely influence his fate in the city. One is a young tour guide, Prabaker, whose gifts include a large smile and an unstoppably joyful heart. Through Prabaker, Lindsay learns Marathi (a language not often spoken by gora, or foreigners), gets to know village India and settles, for a time, in a vast shantytown, operating an illicit free clinic. The second person he meets is Karla, a beautiful Swiss-American woman with sea-green eyes and a circle of expatriate friends. Lin's love for Karla—and her mysterious inability to love in return—gives the book its central tension. "Linbaba's" life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. There he learns about Karla's connection to Khader and discovers who set him up for arrest. Roberts, who wrote the first drafts of the novel in prison, has poured everything he knows into this book and it shows. It has a heartfelt, cinemascope feel. If there are occasional passages that would make the very angels of purple prose weep, there are also images, plots, characters, philosophical dialogues and mysteries that more than compensate for the novel's flaws. A sensational read, it might well reproduce its bestselling success in Australia here.
Publishers Weekly
A thousand pages is like a thousand pounds—it sounds like too much to deal with. Nevertheless, Roberts' very long novel sails along at an amazingly fast clip. Readers in the author's native Australia apparently finished every page of it, for they handed it considerable praise. Now U.S. readers can enjoy this rich saga based on Roberts' own life: escape from a prison in Australia and a subsequent flight to Bombay. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Shantaram:
1. Although Gregory David Roberts refers to Shantaram as a "novel," what do you make of the fact that its events are based on his own life? Does that knowledge make the story more interesting, more powerful? How does it affect the way you view the primary character Lin?
2. What would you most like to ask Roberts if you were to meet him?
3. In an interview Roberts says,
I don’t believe that there are Good men or Bad men. I believe that the deeds we do are Good and Bad, not the men and women who commit them.... I’ve known mafia men who took responsibility for feeding the poor in their district, and I’ve known cops who were ruthlessly cruel. We human beings are just that—human animals with the capacity to do Good or to do Bad—and we all do both, to a greater or lesser degree.
What do you think of his remark, and how is his philosophy expressed in the novel? Are there good and bad characters in Shantaram—or characters who do good and bad things? What about your own life—"good" and "bad" people...or actions?
4. According to Roberts, one of the novel's major themes is loneliness—through exile and alienation. How does Roberts use islands, a central image throughout the novel, to represent his theme? Consider Bombay itself (known as the Island City) or Leopold's Beer Bar (referred to frequently as an island). What other islands, literal and figurative, can you indentify in Shantaram? How do they work as images of exile and alienation?
5. Lin comes to India as an exile, already set apart from the villagers with their profound sense of belonging. How do Lin's experiences change him, gradually rescuing him from his isolation. Consider, for instance, the two different taxi accidents—and Lin's two different responses. What else and who else help Lin overcome his alienation—from himself, from humanitiy, from a sense of meaning in his life?
6. What draws Lin to Khader Khan? Does Lin's connection with the mafia don alleviate—or exacerbate—his isolation? Consider his emotional bond with Khader Khan, but also his moral alienation as he reverts to a life of crime.
7. Love represents the only real hope for escaping exile and alienation. There is love between Lin and Karla. What other forms of love occur in Shantaram? Who else experiences love?
8. Events occur twice in the novel, like the two taxi accidents mentioned in Question 5. There are other parallel events and character relationships—what Roberts has referred to as the story's "house of mirrors." Here are several mirror examples:
floods — secret staircases — face "amputations"— wedding parties — the green scarf and green banner — Ulla and Khaled (both have sold themselves to survive) —Mourizio and Aabdul Ghani — Karla and Lisa Carter
Find other "mirrors," and talk about how each pair reflects one another. Roberts says the mirrors represent the self-referential nature of the universe itself. You might also think of them as symbolic of the deep connectedness within all of life.
9. Talk about the novel's many characters: why you like or dislike them—admire them or find them abhorrent. Does Roberts present them as complex individuals, or as one-dimensional cartoon-type characters? What do you think about the author's frequent references to eyes, for instance, as a sort of shorthand method of characterization. Does that device work?
10. Some reviewers find Roberts' prose style heavy-handed, even silly, bordering on the purple prose of cheap romance stories. Others find the prose lush, vibrant, and compelling. Can you find examples of either style? Overall, what is your opinion of Roberts' prose?
11. What about the book's ending? Do you see it as hopeful? Has Lin found...or will he find...redemption?
12. Shantaram represents the second work (though the first published) in a planned trilogy. Are you inspired by this work to read the other installments once they are published?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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