shantaram...book review

BOOK REVIEW

Book-Shantaram
Author-Gregory David Roberts
Pages-936
Price-Rs.495



Gregory David Roberts, an escaped prisoner, an armed robber, a heroin addict and “The Gentleman Bandit” has lived his life at the knife’s edge. However, what is bewildering is that not only has he managed to survive the anarchy of life, living on the margins, but has also managed to hammer down a twisting chronicle tracing the atrocities of fate and mind in the form of his bestseller Shantaram.

Shantaram is a sprawling tale of a man who escapes from prison, only to vanish in the slums of a foreign land (in this case India) and ultimately becomes enmeshed in the power structures of the filthy underbelly of Mumbai. Although the book is partly autobiographical, some of its major characters like Prabaker and the protagonist’s recurring romantic interest Karla are fictional. Roberts’ tale not only pumps life into the caricatures of imagination but also endows the city (Mumbai) with a life of its own. A city bubbling with enthusiasm and sagging with the pace of human activity. Everything becomes a vivid visualization, like visions running past a moving vehicle, precisely because Roberts lived so much of this enthralling journey.

The book becomes an escape, both at the literal and sub-textual level. An escape for the narrator not only from the authorities and prisons but also from his own past, his own fragmented consciousness. Over its 1000 pages the book weaves together various narratives and includes in its Diaspora many exotic worlds of romance, thrill, philosophy and life. At the core of this saga dwells the passionate love for an alien land breeding in the heart of the narrator who is a “ revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime and a poet who lost his soul in prison.” Panoramic in this conception, the novel inculcates within its circumference a vast range of human experiences, from burning slums to a pastiche clinic, agonies of prisons and essence of bollywood films, from mujaheddin guerrillas to the collapse of the Iron Curtain. To some extent, Roberts’ text also assumes the form of a social and political commentary.

Shantaram portrays the identity crises of a wanted criminal, Lin (again a pseudonym) and unveils the dark side of his character by tracing its connections to two major characters of the novel-Khader Khan, the mafia godfather and Karla. It is often said that best books take us to places that we never knew existed. Gregory David Roberts takes his readers on such a tour of a dark and lonely place: his soul.

The book has recently caught the cinematic gaze of Warner Bros and would be soon turned into a movie casting Johnny Depp in the lead role. So those who have not already tasted Roberts’ lapses into pure beauty, this is the time. Fear not the size but the journey this book shall immerse you into, a journey full of personal reflections and illusionary mirrors. Don’t think about the temporal restrictions too “for so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on.”