Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

While the blurb on the jacket describes this as ‘a literary masterpiece’ I do beg to differ. It’s a huge read, at about 900 pages, and I did find myself skipping some of the gory murderous detail, especially in the bit where the gang members are fighting in Afghanistan. But I’m ahead of myself… The book is purportedly a memoir of an escaped Australian convict’s ten years or so hiding out in Bombay. It’s a terrific insight into the lives of slum dwellers and the gangsters in the city, though word now has it that the whole thing is wildly exaggerated and in many instances completely fabricated. We’ll never know. Roberts, known locally as Lin, moves into the slum and starts up a first aid practice. The story of this part of his life is entertaining and often endearing. However he later joins up with a gang of principalled gangsters, well semi-principalled anyway in that they don’t deal in drugs or pornography or women, and the story becomes quite bogged down in details of the gang members (whose names and characters I regularly confused, right through to the last pages of the book), the leader’s philosophical discussions, the various wars they fight and so forth. They even head off to Afghanistan to have a go at the Russians there with devastating results. The truth about who has been manipulating whom comes out at the end and is a gift for conspiracy theorists. In terms of literary merit, well, there are a lot of words and probably far too many of them. He waxes lyrical a little too much for my liking. The value of the book is in the story, which overall is a good yarn, though the ease with which he accepts the abominations that these gangs perpetrate on one another is truly shocking. If it all happened that way. In summary I think thriller readers would like this book for its story and pace. But I really didn’t like Lin and I won’t be buying the sequel.