Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #706 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Released on: 2005-09-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 944 pages

Amazon.com Review
Crime and punishment, passion and loyalty, betrayal and redemption are only a few of the ingredients in Shantaram, a massive, over-the-top, mostly autobiographical novel. Shantaram is the name given Mr. Lindsay, or Linbaba, the larger-than-life hero. It means "man of God's peace," which is what the Indian people know of Lin. What they do not know is that prior to his arrival in Bombay he escaped from an Australian prison where he had begun serving a 19-year sentence. He served two years and leaped over the wall. He was imprisoned for a string of armed robberies peformed to support his heroin addiction, which started when his marriage fell apart and he lost custody of his daughter. All of that is enough for several lifetimes, but for Greg Roberts, that's only the beginning.

He arrives in Bombay with little money, an assumed name, false papers, an untellable past, and no plans for the future. Fortunately, he meets Prabaker right away, a sweet, smiling man who is a street guide. He takes to Lin immediately, eventually introducing him to his home village, where they end up living for six months. When they return to Bombay, they take up residence in a sprawling illegal slum of 25,000 people and Linbaba becomes the resident "doctor." With a prison knowledge of first aid and whatever medicines he can cadge from doing trades with the local Mafia, he sets up a practice and is regarded as heaven-sent by these poor people who have nothing but illness, rat bites, dysentery, and anemia. He also meets Karla, an enigmatic Swiss-American woman, with whom he falls in love. Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Karla’s connections are murky from the outset.

Roberts is not reluctant to wax poetic; in fact, some of his prose is downright embarrassing. Throughought the novel, however, all 944 pages of it, every single sentence rings true. He is a tough guy with a tender heart, one capable of what is judged criminal behavior, but a basically decent, intelligent man who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially anyone he knew. He is a magnet for trouble, a soldier of fortune, a picaresque hero: the rascal who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. His story is irresistible. Stay tuned for the prequel and the sequel. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
At the start of this massive, thrillingly undomesticated potboiler, a young Australian man bearing a false New Zealand passport that gives his name as "Lindsay" flies to Bombay some time in the early '80s. On his first day there, Lindsay meets the two people who will largely influence his fate in the city. One is a young tour guide, Prabaker, whose gifts include a large smile and an unstoppably joyful heart. Through Prabaker, Lindsay learns Marathi (a language not often spoken by gora, or foreigners), gets to know village India and settles, for a time, in a vast shantytown, operating an illicit free clinic. The second person he meets is Karla, a beautiful Swiss-American woman with sea-green eyes and a circle of expatriate friends. Lin's love for Karla—and her mysterious inability to love in return—gives the book its central tension. "Linbaba's" life in the slum abruptly ends when he is arrested without charge and thrown into the hell of Arthur Road Prison. Upon his release, he moves from the slum and begins laundering money and forging passports for one of the heads of the Bombay mafia, guru/sage Abdel Khader Khan. Eventually, he follows Khader as an improbable guerrilla in the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. There he learns about Karla's connection to Khader and discovers who set him up for arrest. Roberts, who wrote the first drafts of the novel in prison, has poured everything he knows into this book and it shows. It has a heartfelt, cinemascope feel. If there are occasional passages that would make the very angels of purple prose weep, there are also images, plots, characters, philosophical dialogues and mysteries that more than compensate for the novel's flaws. A sensational read, it might well reproduce its bestselling success in Australia here.
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From The Washington Post
The Australian father turned heroin addict turned escaped convict who narrates this sprawling, intelligent novel gets several new names from the people he meets in India, where he goes to hide from the law. One of them is Shantaram, which means "man of peace" or "man of God's peace." The irony does not escape Lin, a man of many secrets who is willing to kill to protect those secrets. Yet he finds hope in his christening as well. "I don't know if they found that name in the heart of the man they believed me to be, or if they planted it there, like a wishing tree, to bloom and grow," Lin says. "Whatever the case, . . . the truth is that the man I am was born in those moments."

Shantaram, a blatantly autobiographical first novel by Gregory David Roberts, an Australian author who himself fled to India after escaping from prison, sets out to tell the story of Lin's transformation from desperate, bitter man on the run to, if not a man of peace, then a man of understanding, a man at peace with his life and the mistakes he has made.

The book, told in 933 readable pages, follows him from a remote Indian village in monsoon season to the Afghan mountains in winter, but mostly it takes place in Bombay: in a slum where he founds a medical clinic, in a prison where he is beaten and tortured, in meetings of a branch of the India mafia led by Abdel Khader Khan, an Afghan who becomes a father figure and employer for the fugitive.

The book is full of vibrant characters: Prabaker, the Indian with the winning smile who is Lin's first guide to the city; Karla, a Swiss woman also fleeing a troubled past, with whom Lin becomes infatuated. But Bombay itself is Shantaram's strongest personality. Lin's love of the mafia don and the green-eyed Karla feels suspect to me, but his -- and Roberts's -- love of India and the people who live there is unmistakable and a joy to read about.

Roberts's writing is never understated. He sounds sometimes like Raymond Chandler, with that noir mix of toughness, sentiment and bravado. This style threatens to tip over into the overwrought, and sometimes it does. The sections about Karla and romantic love are the weakest in the book. He describes a kiss in this way: "Our lips met like waves that crest and merge the whirl of storming seas." Are you sure?

But the exuberance of his prose is refreshing in this age of finely crafted fiction, and the insight he shows into men's weaker and stronger traits can be moving. The novel's prison sections are riveting and convincing; when Roberts writes about what it feels like to be knifed, I believe him. And then Prabaker shows up before his wedding night, worried that as a "short and small" man, he won't be a good lover. Lin tells him "that love makes men big, and hate makes them small. I told him that my little friend was one of the biggest men I ever met because there wasn't any hate in him. I said that the better I knew him, the bigger he got." I don't mind a dose of sentimentality if the sentiment it reflects feels true.

The novel loses its drive when Lin leaves India to fight in "Khader's war," as the Afghan attempts to deliver weapons and other aid to the insurgency against the Soviets in the late 1980s. Here, Roberts ties up the various strands of this story, revealing the invisible net that has connected all of Lin's experiences, from the slum to Karla to his work for Khader. But his tying-up seems more important to the plot than it does to the novel, and the book lags in these pages.

Lin's transformation, which gives the novel its name, is problematic as well. Toward the end, he offers a well-paying job in Khader's illegal enterprise to two friends from the slum. "I'd never anticipated the saddened and offended expressions that closed their smiles," Roberts writes. "Was I so far out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of decent men?" Yes, but he doesn't seem to catch on. It's hard to believe the character who displays so much wisdom is still working for the mafia at the end, going off to fight another part of Khader's war, after an alleged realization that the violent struggle for power is always wrong.

Despite this failing, Shantaram displays an intelligence about human nature and a warmth for the human race that continue to be alluring long after the plot loses steam. Early on Lin talks about a peculiar Indian custom that he calls "amiable abduction." "For months, in the slum, I'd succumbed to the vague and mysterious invitations of friends to accompany them to unspecified places, for unknown purposes. You come, people said with smiling urgency, never feeling the need to tell me where we were going, or why. You come now!" Shantaram itself is an amiable abduction. Roberts brings us through Bombay's slums and opium houses, its prostitution dens and ex-pat bars, saying, You come now. And we follow.

Reviewed by Carole Burns
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A great book
I read Shantaram about a year ago and hands down it is the best book I read all year, maybe in the past five years. It is really memorable. The prison scenes, life in Mumbai, the characters, stay alive long after I stopped reading. The book is long, but I never wanted it to end. A year later, I miss it.

Shantaram- a novel by Gregory David Roberts
This book was recommended by a friend who was reading it. It is absolutely a must read book. I felt as though I learned more about life in India in the first fifty pages than I knew in my life so far (I don't get out much.)It felt as if I was reading an autobiography, and after reading about the authors life, that feeling may not be far from the truth. The characters are well developed,the plot lines are numerous without getting tangled. The revelations about Australian and Indian prisons and the Indian mob are complex in their textures. I don't want to give anything away, for though there are a lot of pages, I looked forward to each one.

The frustrating tale of an anti-hero who does not learn
The first third of Shantaram was - despite some lengths - compelling. I developed sympathy for the protagonist and due to severeal hints I expected him to become a better man in the course of all those 1000+ pages. But then, after around 400 pages the story takes a strange turn and develops into some senseless, violence ridden tale. Lin starts to spend his time with characters you could not care less about and puts himself himself deeper and deeper into senseless, violent, dumb and ultimately boring situations. Actually the story's dramatic demise begins with Lin's involvement with the Mafia. I just read on because I could not believe that he would not learn and get out of this crap, but become more and more detached from his own emotions. Instead of facing his own demons he runs away from them by either taking heroin or putting himself in life threatening situations. One after the other after the other. YAWN. The protagonist develops into an annoying jerk and one seriously starts to question his intelligence. No personal development to the better. None at all. Honestly, the second half of the book is a total waste of time. I wish Roberts had simply written his autobiography.