Shantaram is a magnum opus, if the word also means voluminous. It is 933 pages long book of immense quality, and its thickness needs to be mentioned as this is what confronts you when you get hold of it. But the book had confronted me long before, when my friends kept talking about it at various odd hours. Naturally they were proud to have read a newly arrived masterpiece or were gathering my attention to one of the characters-my namesake in the book.
So, finally I got the chance to read it, on the auspicious occasion of the New Year. The first 10 pages I read, and I was already exclaiming, What a Book! I wanted to scream it in my Facebook status, but I held on. I knew why I had been engulfed pronto by the book: Its verbatim portrayal of Indian life as viewed by a foreigner. The book arrived directly on my pulses, ever bitten by the Indophile bug. The things started unfolding then …
I am critical of my two bad reading habits: slow reading and short reading. But this time around, my short reading habit, around 1 hour daily, of the book gave me probably the best feel of the book. I was progressing daily as the characters in the book moved. Each day of my reading provided a unique view of the life of the main character, Linbaba- an absconding robber and heroin addict from Australia, who makes Bombay his new abode. His life starts getting involved into the Indianness of things, bringing an ever changing perspective of his beliefs. He meets people, he helps them, he falls in love, he joins mafia council, he is sent to Indian prison, he joins a war in Afghanistan: there are a myriad sub-stories in the whole run. The full story has to be experienced through virtual living though, not just read.
Gregory David Roberts’ attempt to imbibe such a touch into the novel is what this makes it a scorcher, as more often than not, we start wondering and marveling at his life and its various adventures. He has said that while the novel is based on his real-life experiences, most of it is fictional. Nevertheless the ‘fictional realism’ so intensely at work suspends our digressing thoughts.
This is probably why the book ticks, more so with the lovers, familiars and inquisitors of India. And this helps it tide over some of the major defects of the book. It is no doubt a great art to expound philosophical details, but if done to death without a similar parallel evolution, it gnaws at your mind and interest. I felt like skipping the pages, when the hyper thoughts pondered by the characters started erupting with no credo on display. The book does need editing on this front. Also the second half, I believe, is not able to sustain the momentum gained in the first half. I generally have liked the latter part of the books more often, as the writers deliberately provide the crescendo touch in an attempt to leave the reader in perpetual touch even after the end. Here I believe the story just tapered off to a plateau.
May be this was done to let the reader seamlessly segue into its sequel which is incidentally to arrive in the later part of this year. I do have high expectations of this book too. But really Shantaram’s experience can be lived only once, as Gregory Roberts too did, and so volubly expressed in the book. Just readit and live it, what more can I say?
