"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

"Alexandria: The Quest of the Lost City" by Edmund Richardson

 This is a wonderful story about a private in the East India Company in India in 1827 who deserts and reinvents himself as explorer Charles Masson. He has multiple adventures before becoming besotted with the idea that Bagram, near Kabul in Afghanistan, is the site of Alexandria-Under-the-Mountains, one of the many lost cities founded by Alexander the Great (he had previously stumbled across the site of the Harappan civilisation, but doesn't seem to have been impressed). His journeys included the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan, and the man-made caves behind them, Gholghola, the City of Screams (made by the wind passing through its pinnacles) which was destroyed by Genghis Khan, and a 'dead dragon'. His researches include the translation of an unknown Indian script and the discovery of "the very earliest dateable image of the Buddha which has ever been found" (Ch 6), a work of art with clear Greek influences. When his past caught up with him he was blackmailed into spying for the East India Company on his friends, the rulers of Kabul; he later became involved in the loot-fuelled British invasion of that country, then, suspected as a double agent, a British prisoner, until finally he escaped from India just as the British hubris caught up with them and they were slaughtered while retreating from Kabul in the winter of 1841 - 1842.

It is an incredibly romantic story, full of action, and would make a superb film. As well as the exotic location and the multiple story of survival despite incredible hardships, it is people with larger-than-life characters:

• James Lewis/ Charles Masson himself. He repeatedly reinvented his own story.
• Josiah Harlan, an American fantasist, traveller, and spy, who claimed to have been created Prince of Ghor (Ch 14)
• Joseph Wolff, a fanatical preacher. "He was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind. He had spent years wandering ... preaching all the way. Every day, he had become grumpier and more dogmatic." After annoying one party of Afghans they stripped him so he had to walk into Kabul naked. "Even when fully clothed, Wolff was a remarkable sight. ... Naked, he quite baffled the thesaurus."  (Ch 4)
• Henry Pottinger, the East Indian Company's resident in Bhuj: "Think back to the most easily irritated person you have ever met. Double their sensitivity. You might now be coming close to Pottinger. If you left him alone in a room for a few minutes, he would probably be nursing a lifelong grudge against the sofa and two of the floorboards by the time you returned." (Ch 6)
• "treasure-hunting Transylvanian Johann Martin Honigberger ... liked quoting Cicero, practising homeopathy, and smashing things." (Ch 6)
• Dost Mohammed, a ruler of Kabul, spent years "drinking his courtiers under the table" before becoming abstemious and banning alcohol. He has a proverbial reputation as a just ruler. (Ch 6)

It is also a chronicle of the shame of colonialism. Some incidents recounted are even more sickening than the comprehensive condemnation in The Anarchy by Willaim Dalrymple:

• "East India House was loot made manifest." (Ch 12)
• "'One or two little bits of smashery took place,' laughed one officer. 'It is perfectly annoying to see a lot of those fellows come screeching after you that they have been looted. This generally happens during the first or second day you enter a place'." (Ch 15)
• Loveday, a political officer, enslaved Indians to work on building his palace, one of whom displeased him and was savaged by Loveday's bulldogs, later dying  of his injuries. "He was proud of 'blowing from a gun' one local chief ... Loveday slid up the greasy pole like a man born to the art ... Loveday proved to be a world-class looter." (Ch 15)
• It's not just British imperialism that was evil. Alexander the Great massacred all the men of military age and enslaved all other inhabitants at both Tyre and Gaza. He looted and burned Persepolis. (Ch 20)

Selected quotes:

• "When Lewis was a teenager, the British economy was teetering on the brink of collapse. London's streets filled up with the newly homeless. ... The government responded with a sympathy which has marked British attitudes to the poor for centuries: they announced a plan to execute the protesters." (Ch 1)
• "When you walk into a room full of strangers, there's a precious moment when you can become whoever you want to be." (Ch 2)
• "The Pashtuns say that when God created the world he had a heap of rocks left over, out of which he made Afghanistan." (Ch 3) This reminded me of a similar quote about the founding of Montenegro, as found in The Venetian Empire by Jan Morris.
• "Alexander [the Great] travelled far. But stories about him have travelled even further. There is an Icelandic Alexander Saga and an Armenian epic, a Balinese poem and a French romance." (Ch 7)
• "Then the assassins came for Masson. One night, a sudden noise pulled him from sleep. He blinked awake and stumbled to the door. Men with knives were running up the stairs." (Ch 9)
• "The people of Malana are proud of their ancestor, Alexander the Great. The family business is no longer world conquest, but the cultivation of some of the most potent marijuana on earth." (Ch 11)
• "He was still convinced ... that the East India Company cared; that a thoroughly amoral, capitalist empire could also be kind." (Ch 12)
• "When it rained, the lower town flooded, and the poor waded through the shit of the rich." (Ch 15)
• "The Parsis had arrived in India from Persia over a thousand years earlier. They brought with them stories about Alexander: fearful tales, legends of a violent, ruthless king, who brought nothing but death and destruction in his wake." (Ch 20)
• "Heinrich Schliemann loved a tall tale even more than Charles Masson did. Today, schollars are divided between those who think he was a liar, and those who think he was a 'pathological liar'." (Ch 21)
• "Evans is another of history's great archaeological stars ... It is rarely mentioned that many of his craftsmen worked two shifts: the first, restoring Minoan antiquities, and the second, faking Minoan antiquities." (Ch 21)

This is an absolutely brilliant book. The hero is incredible, his adventures page-turning, and the cast of characters beautifully drawn. In addition, it is very well written. 

September 2022; 261 pages

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"And the Mountains Echoed" by Khaled Hosseini

 Abdullah is a poor boy living with his father, his sister Pari, his stepmother and his baby half-brother Iqbal in a dirt-poor village in Afghanistan. His uncle's rich employer wants a daughter and Abdullah's father arranges that she should adopt Pari; Abdullah is devastated. This book follows the consequences for all those who are touched by the story: for Uncle Nabi and for Markos, the Greek doctor who comes to live in Bani's house, and for the next generations.

If there is a theme, it is that some people are born beautiful and have all the luck; others are ill or crippled, and ugly and crooked and plain; that some people have the gift of caring for the afflicted and that some can only hide themselves away: 

• "All her life, Parwana had made sure to avoid standing in front of a mirror with her sister. It robbed her of hope to see her face beside Masooma's, to see so plainly what she had been denied. But in public, every stranger's eye was a mirror." (3)
• "I learned that the world didn't see inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone." (8)
• "Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly." (8)

This book is beautifully written. There were moments when my heart-strings were tugged and there  are perfect descriptions:

• "A delicate crescent moon cradled the dim ghostly outline of its full self." (2)

There are also moments full of the poetry of parenthood:

• "When I was a little girl, my father and I ad a nightly ritual.  After ... he had tucked me into bed, he would sit at my side and pluck bad dreams from my head with his thumb and forefinger. His fingers would hop from my forehead to my temples, patiently searching behind my ears, at the back of my head, and he'd make a pop sound - like a bottle being uncorked - with each nightmare he purged from my brain. He stashed the dreams, one by one, into an invisible sack in his lap and pulled the drawstring tightly. He would then scour the air, looking for happy dreams to replace the ones he had sequestered away. I watched as he cocked his head slightly and frowned, his eyes roaming side to side, like he was straining to hear distant music. I held my breath, waiting for the moment when my father's face unfirled into a smile, when he sang Ah, here is one, when he cupped his hands, let the dream land in his palms like a petal slowly twirling down from a tree. Gently, then, so very gently - my father said all good things in life were fragile and easily lost - he would raise his hands to his face, rub my palms against his brow and happiness into my head." (9)

Hosseini has also written The Kite Runner, his break-through novel, and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Selected quotes:

• "When you have lived as long as I have ... you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color." (1)
• "He kept returning. Every night he could be heard whimpering mournfully and every morning they found him lying by the door, chin on his front paws, blinking up at his assailants with melancholy, unaccusing eyes." (2)
• "A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and the thrill of being seen with Masooma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream." (3)
• "A life lived from the backseat, observed as it blurred by." (4)
• "Their fights didn't so much end as dissipate, like a drop of ink in a bowl of water, with a residual taint that lingered." (4)
• "I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us." (4)
• "Most people have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But what really guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want." (8)

June 2022; 402 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Tracking Marco Polo" by Tim Severin

Severin is an explorer and travel writer; other works of his include The Sindbad Voyage and The Brendan Voyage. In this trip he used motorbikes to follow the route of Marco Polo, comparing what he discovered with the account in Polo's famous book. His companions were Michael de Larrabeiti, a cameraman who later became a novelist, and Stanley Johnson who later became the father of the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Johnson, initially described as "a burly young man with an unruly shock of blond hair" (C 1), becomes a sort of expedition bludgeon who drives his motorbike (which he repeatedly crashes) where it is determined not to go.

Despite still being an undergraduate at the time, Severin showed that many of the features of Polo's narrative could be matched with things still to be seen. For example, he found a family of Armenian descent in a Turkish village still weaving a fine silk cloth that he interpreted as 'buckram', described by Polo. He also ate a nectarine which he believed to be what Polo had called one of the 'apples of paradise' and locates the Village of the Magi, complete with an ancient Zoroastrian fire-temple. There is one moment (in chapter 7), though, where he discovers a water culvert which plunges into a subterranean tunnel and he compares it with Marco Polo's description, seemingly unaware that this might be the reference that Coleridge turned into "Alph the sacred river" which "ran through caverns measureless to man."

The history and travelled are enlivened by the description of three young daredevils on two motorbikes, originally with sidecars, which they couldn't properly ride (they didn't even have licenses for the English section of the journey). By the most brazen good fortune, the expedition repeatedly overcomes catastrophe. This would make a great road trip movie!

There are also a number of passages of extraordinarily brilliant description:

• "The mineraliferous mountains glowed in their reds, purples, greys and browns, where the naked rock lay exposed to the long winter snows and the fierce summer sun. The road itself was little more than a rough stony path along which we twisted and turned the labouring motorcycles, leaving plumes of dust along the steep climbs and round the sharp shoulders of the rocky flanks. From time to time we skidded down into valleys and the track plunged sharply into a rushing stream. Then with the engines roaring wildly, we were forced to slither crazily into the ford, hoping that our momentum would surge the machines across before water was drawn into the bubbling exhaust pipes or we came to grief on a hidden boulder." (C 4)
• "The fabled lakes of Band-i-Amir ... amongst the highest in the world. In the clear air of the Hindu Kush, they lie like a broken ribbon of glowing tortoiseshell, caught between the peaks. The walls of the surrounding cliffs contract and expand, giving strange and beautiful shapes to the cold, clear waters which lie in basins, slivers and goblets of crystal. At one end of the chain, a gentle trickle flows in to feed the series. At the lower end, the same trickle re-appears, lapping gently out over a natural dam of rock. When this outflow spills away over the downstream face of the dam, the mineral deposits from the sheet of water have covered the rock wall with a glowing patina of mingling tints, reds, blacks and yellows. In the heady air of the high plateau with the snow-sheathed peaks gleaming at a romantic distance, the limpid purity of the lakes of Band-i-Amir with their sheen of many colours successfully isolate an unsullied shrine of beauty." (C 10)

Other great moments:

• "The driver was in such a state of intoxication that he kept on getting his arms entwined in the spokes of the steering wheel" (C 3)
• "The lives of ordinary people have always been ruled by the common factors of climate and terrain." (C 11)

March 2020; 164 pages

Other great travel books in this blog:
This is one of a number of travel books reviewed in this blog, of which my favourites include:
Classics:

• The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron: Samarkand etc
• Walking through Europe: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor and its sequel Between the Woods and the Water

Travelling in Britain:

• By milk float: Three men in a float by Dan Kieran and Ian Vince
• Walking on the coast (all of it): The Sea on our left by Shally Hunt
• By bike from Lands End to John O'Groats via a lot of pubs: Mud. Sweat and Gears by Ellie Bennett

And others:

• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: mostly the Trans-Siberian railway

"The Road to Oxiana" by Robert Byron

This is a delightful travel book in which Byron travels in 1933-34 through Persia and Afghanistan towards (but never actually reaching) the Oxus river. He is intensely (and sometimes boringly) interested in Mohammedan architecture and its influences. His intended companions are The Charcoal Burners (who are driving an experimental charcoal powered car to India) but they let him down; eventually he meets up with Christopher who accompanies him for many miles. Nowhere is his relationship with Christopher stated; Byron was gay but Christopher Sykes later got married and had children.

The writing is lyrical and enormously beautiful in places. His descriptions of place are superb. His characterisations of some of the strange and eccentric characters he meets (such as the man who speaks pianissimo, then mezzo forte, then fortissimo, then piano etc) is sometimes hilarious.

Interesting bits.

He suggests that Shiraz in Persia from whence derives red wine may be the originator of Sherry rather than Xeres in Spain.

He meets Jews expelled from Russia. He is aware of the problem with Jews and Germany and of the increasing fascism of Germany. Persia itself is under the despotic rule of the Shah whom he calls Marjoribanks.

He meets fire altars and the tomb of Zoroaster near Persepolis.

He hears (pp184-5) a story of a donkey who wears a 'loin' skin which sounds extraordinarily like the model for the donkey in the lion skin from The Last Battle by C S Lewis.

He plays a game using "a high net over which any number of people divided into two sides, can fist a soft football" (p 252) in the Russian Embassy in Afghanistan. Although Volleyball was invented in 1895 and an Olympic sport in 1924 (Paris), Byron seems not to recognise it.

He sees the two giant Buddhas in Shibar that were later destroyed by the Taliban but he is by no means impressed with them as works of art.

Links to Byron's photographs here.

A lyrical travelogue.

May 2010; 276 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.