Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
15 Nov 2012
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts (ISBN-13: 978-0349117546)
I was given this 944 page book by a work colleague. I don’t like books this long as they take a long time to read. But nevertheless I thought I’d give it a go to see how I got on.
The premise of the book was fairly straightforward.
In the early 80s, Gregory David Roberts, an armed robber and heroin addict, escaped from an Australian prison to India, where he lived in a Bombay slum. There, he established a free health clinic and also joined the Mafia, working as a money launderer, forger and street soldier. He found time to learn Hindi and Marathi, fall in love, and spend time being worked over in an Indian jail. Then, in case anyone thought he was slacking, he acted in Bollywood and fought with the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan…
Amazingly, Roberts wrote Shantaram three times after prison guards trashed the first two versions. It’s a profound tribute to his willpower…
At once a high-kicking, eye-gouging adventure, a love saga and a savage yet tenderly lyrical fugitive vision.
Now given that the subject matter of the book was the person who wrote it you may (or would as I did) have though it to be a true story with real characters and I did just that. I slowly ploughed my way through the book getting drawn into this fascinating story. Even thought I was really enjoying the story, reading it in small chunks meant that it took a long time to complete.
Towards the end of the book I got it into my head that I would like to try and find out a little bit more about the author and the other characters in the book. But to my absolute horror I discovered that the people in the book were not real, they’re fictitious. Roberts writes
One change (on the web site) is that I’m deleting the “Character Profiles” section. When I created that section of the site, I had hoped that it would lead readers deeper into the understanding that the characters in my novel, Shantaram, are just that: characters, and not real people. In fact, the opposite has been happening. Many readers are writing to me for information on where they can get in touch with Karla or Abdullah, for example, and asking me about their lives after the events mentioned in the novel. I’ll say this now for the record, and go into it again in more detail in other sections of the site in the next few months: all the characters in my novel are created characters, fictions, invented by me, and none of them resemble living persons in any way.
What the hell. That revelation totally spoilt the story for me. I felt cheated; characters that I’d got to know were just made up, what a swizz. I grudgingly read the last few remaining pages just to finish it off but my heart wasn’t in it any more.