Shantaram (2003) by Gregory David Roberts is a dizzying, frustrating, entertaining novel. The dizzying and entertaining are entwined: the protagonist is a (slightly? radically?) fictionalized version of Roberts himself, and the novel follows his audacious escape from an Australian jail, his travels to India, his time spent running a makeshift clinic in an urban slum of Bombay, more time in jail (this time in India), and many escapades while in the service of a faction of the network of gangs controlling the Bombay underground (including a gun-running trip to Afghanistan).
All of those key events are, it seems, historically true for Roberts, although he insists the details have all been fictionalized and, certainly, there are elements of the central love affair, as well as deeply symbolic characters, that seem quite clearly manifestations of his imagination.
Which lead us to the frustrating bits: Roberts is a good writer, and the action pieces move well, making two-thirds of the almost 1,000 page novel an engaging page-turner. The rest is spent in a mixture of philosophical musings and reflections on morality (to his credit, his own as much as others), and these are, while heartfelt, a bit repetitive, simplistic, and overly Romantic in nature. More importantly, they interrupt the other narratives, proving, in the end a distraction for the reader.
Still, the novel is rewarding overall, and the question of why it hasn’t been made into a movie can only be answered with, “yet.” It is, at core, a great vehicle for a leading man: a hero who, while fully repentant for his sins, is redeemed through both self-knowledge and, ultimately, love itself.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
There is an energetic pacing to the non-philosophical bits that makes Shantaram an instantly commercially attractive book. Maintaining that across a novel this long is something I need to figure out, given how long my novel seems to be insisting on being.