"Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts

'Shantaram' means 'man of peace'. The title is, presumably, ironic. While the first half of this sprawling novel establishes the possibility of an arc of redemption, as the narrator protagonist, on the run from an Australian prison where he has been serving a sentence for armed robbery, opens a free clinic in a Bombay slum. In the second half, he joins the Bombay mafia and goes to war in Afghanistan. Throughout, he celebrates the macho qualities of a fighter, loyal to his comrades, prepared to kill or be killed. The many philosophical discussions between him and his fellows gangsters therefore sound like an attempt to reconcile the violence and criminality of his lifestyle with the need to justify himself to himself as a good man.

It might be based on real life events but, according to the author quoted in wikipedia, "some experiences from my life are described pretty much as they happened, and others are created narratives, informed by my experience. I wanted to write two or three novels on some bare elements from my life, allowing me to explore the themes that interested me, while keeping the narrative immediate by anchoring it to some of my real experiences. They're novels, not autobiographies, and all of the characters and dialogue is created." At first, assuming the novel to be fundamentally autobiographical, I found it difficult to criticise. Maybe there was indeed a devastating fire on the day he moved into the slum, prompting the immediate foundation of his health clinic, but such a coincidence in timing seemed a little novelistic. But if it is meant to be a novel, then it is open to criticism on those grounds.

The protagonist-narrator was a Marty Stu, that is, a male character who embodies the ideals, if not of the author, then of the readership, spawned from wish-fulfilment. Lin was a hero, being strong, brave and great at fighting, able to endure hardship and torture, good at making friends and learning languages, a successful businessman in a variety of black market fields, loyal and with significant medical skills. He acts in Bollywood. Her even turns out to be so good at writing short stories that the editor of one newspaper (a friend) recommends them to the editor of another. Thank goodness he can't ride a horse!

Too good to be true.

On the other hand, the level of detail in the setting supporting the verisimilitude is relentless. This is why so many people believe the novel to be a memoir. It feels true; it seems certain that the author (who was indeed an armed robber who escaped from an Australian jail and was eventually recaptured and wrote the novel while completing his sentence) lived among these people and had many of the experiences recounted. There are some great descriptions!

• “The umbilical corridor that connected the plane to the airport.” (Ch 1)
• “I stepped down to the street with the words of the young Canadian’s warning wheeling and turning in my mind like gulls above a spawning tide.” (Ch 1)
• “the carnival of needs and greeds” (Ch 1) describing an Indian street.
• “Skeined all over the buildings like metal cobwebs were complicated traces of electrical conduits and wires.” (Ch 3) Though I suspect the traceries were more of a fractal branching structure, far less organised than the geometrical perfection of a cobweb.
• “The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eye-wateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned.” (Ch 40)
• “Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel.” (Ch 41)

Even though the other characters are backed up by a plethora of details they played fundamentally stereotypical parts. There is the wise guru who acts as a father figure, the elusive love interest, the friendly servant and companion (a comedy role, of course), the loyal friend. There is even a Jesus figure who dies only to be resurrected in an improbable twist (when a second character also returns to life, seriously scarred, I was reminded me of Voltaire's comedy classic Candide, in which a number of apparently killed-off characters reappear, usually with bits of of their buttocks missing).

EM Forster suggests that we are prejudiced to like big books because we don't want to admit that all that time we have invested in reading them was wasted. I think the opposite: for me a big book needs to justify the hours it mined from my life. The plot was epic in its ambition and marked by significant gear-shifts. It started as a travelogue to the seamy side of Bombay, the days spent touring sights such as the slave market, the nights drinking with other ex-pats. Lin then visited his guide's village. This section felt like Christopher Isherwood's autofictional work Goodbye to Berlin, with Karla playing the role of unapproachable love interest Sally Bowles. On the return to Bombay, we move into a redemption story as the hero moves into the slum and sets up a free health clinic. Suddenly he is captured by police and we have a prison story. Then, in another change of pace, he is released and becomes a member of the Bombay mafia. Yet another shift sees him travel to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians with the mujaheddin. Finally we have the endpiece, marked by death and resurrection, in which all the buried threads and revealed and untangled.

In fact, Shantaram is at least five books, held together, to some extent, by the on-off love affair between Lin and Karla. Each book is studded with set pieces, such as the rescue of Lisa from Madame Zhou's brothel (which has, in the warning that if Lisa returns she will have to stay, a strong echo of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice), the trip to the slave market, the Indian village experience, the fire in the slum, the fight with feral dogs, the cholera epidemic, the picnic high up in an unfinished tower block, the prison, the cold turkey, the battles in Afghanistan, and the culminating gangster fight. Not so much five books, perhaps, as a whole series of frequently stand-alone episodes in a miniseries.

Within each story, the narrative was frequently paused to make room for a chunk of character analysis, to dump a chunk of background information, or to reflect, wearisomely, upon philosophy. Sometimes the same ideas were repeated. This gave the whole thing a blocky feeling.

It sometimes felt incoherent. What was the point of the training of Tariq? I suppose it could be argued that this is how real life works, and this adds to the authenticity of the narrative. But it is a novel, and sometimes the narration seemed to be spur of the moment. For example, we have met Maurizio and Modena before but it is only when their story is foregrounded that we hear their back stories. We only learn about Lin's first-aid training when he needs it to cope with the cholera epidemic. This 'just in time' narration detracted from the verisimilitude, making it appear, rightly or wrongly, that the author was inventing details as necessary to bolster a narrative that was already underway.

There were also a lot of characters and I found it quite difficult to work out who was who. Or, in the end, as the death toll mounted, to care.

It is narrated in the first person and the past tense.

There are a lot of philosophical musings and aphorisms, particularly about freedom:

• “The facts of fugitive life is that you have to keep on escaping, every day and every night.” (Ch 1)
• “Every day, when you're on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.” (Ch 1)
• “Imprisonment meant that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn't hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad.” (Ch 2)
• “With my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. Years into the banishment, I realized that I was exiled to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast.” (Ch 10)
• “The past reflects eternally between two mirrors - the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say.” (Ch 2)
• “The real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.” (Ch 4)
• “If fate doesn't make you laugh ... then you just don't get the joke.” (Ch 8)
• “God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.” (Ch 9)
• “Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.” (Ch 11)
• “Happiness is a myth. ... It was invented to make us buy things.” (Ch 13)
• “Why do bad people suffer so little? And why do good people suffer so much?” (Ch 14)
• “You can only ever be yourself. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you find yourself standing in the way.” (Ch 39)
• “Heroes only come in three kinds, dead, damaged, or dubious.” (Ch 41)
• “Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting.” (Ch 42)

Selected quotes:

• “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.” (Opening sentence)
• “Two pairs of clear, pale blue eyes stared at me with the vague, almost accusatory censure of those who have convinced themselves that they found the one true path.” (Ch 1)
• “We Indian fellows, we don't worry about the foreplayings. We go straight to the bumping and jumping.” (Ch 1)
• “Each table had four or more cedar chairs - sixty-minute chairs, Karla used to call them, because they were just uncomfortable enough to discourage customers from staying for more than an hour.” (Ch 2)
• “This is ... a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe.” (Ch 2)
• “I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting on a condom to masturbate.” (Ch 2) I'm not sure this metaphor works.
• “I told him once he's so shallow that the best he can manage is a single entendre.” (Ch 2)
• “Federico has found religion. It is a tragedy. He no longer drinks or smokes or takes drugs. And of course he will not have sex with anyone - not even with himself! It is an appalling waste of talent.” (Ch 4)
• “A dream is the place where I wish and a fear meet. Where the wish and the fear are exactly the same ... we call the dream a nightmare.” (Ch 7)
• “Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they're very tired.” (Ch 10)
• “My face reddened with that special guilty blush of the completely innocent man.” (Ch 14)
• “The little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration.” (Ch 26)
• “He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic.” (Ch 26)
• “My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones.” (Ch 27)
• “The glamour that laminated the movie world.” (Ch 29)
• “You guys haven't got the brains of two fleas on a pariah dog's balls.” (Ch 29)
• “Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul.” (Ch 30)
• “A cat can make you look clumsy, and a dog can make you look stupid, but only a horse can make you look both at the same time.” (Ch 30)
• “Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space.” (Ch 37)
• “Indra, known as the Poet, spoke almost all of his sentences in rhyming couplets. They were deeply moving in their beauty, for the first few stanzas, but always found their way into sexual descriptions and allusions so perverse and abhorrent that strong, wicked men winced to hear them.” (Ch 40)

Short verdict: I loved the initial travelogue and the redemptive arc in the slum. I started becoming disenchanted during the prison scenes. I was indifferent to the mafia stories. The Afghanistan section should have been another book.  I was bored in the final section, skim-reading to get to the end.

I read it in seven days.

July 2026; 933 pages
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Scribe Publications
My paperback 'twentieth anniversary' edition was issued by Abacus in 2023.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God