Has anyone else out there in the bookish blogosphere read Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts? I’m working my way through it. 900 pages of fast-moving story doesn’t necessarily feel like 900 pages, but it is still taking a while to read. And I’m not reviewing it for any publication I work for- I picked it up at Partners and Crime, one of my favorite bookstores.
I’m looking for a word to capture the writing style. Shantaram may be a memoir. It may be fiction. It may be a fictionalized, sensationalized memoir. The author is perfectly candid about a few facts that his biography seems to bear out. He escaped an Australian prison, and fled to Bombay. He was later captured, and sentenced to serve the remainder of his jail time. While he was in jail the second time, he wrote this book. Who can really say, except the author, how much is memoir (which has its own departures from the objective truth) and how much is an imaginative construct.
Also, remembering my own studies of anthropology, particularly Reading National Geographic, I have to wonder if being a white man in the slums of Bombay creates its own fictional slants and roles to play. The reason I’m reaching out to others who have read this excellent book is tied up with that perception as well. I want to know if others find that some of Roberts’ language drifts close to smirking and smug. Many passages are beautiful. (Some descriptions, verging on the poetic, get a little self conscious with glorious imagery.) Ideally, I would love to dig around in the text with someone else who has studied anthropology, and see if I’m over-analyzing, or using rusty, faulty logic too much. I want a second opinion.
I also need to remember that, by positioning the narrative voice between philosopher and criminal, the prose is going to be more than a little bit slick at times. And that, for all its odd whiffs of colonialism or counter-colonialism, is what makes a 900 page novel about Bombay’s black market, such a fast-paced read. It reminds me of “Catch Me If You Can,” by Frank Abagnale- later a Matt Damon movie of the same name. Very slick prose, in Abagnale’s tale of getting away with all kinds of scams. Slick, smug prose belonged there. I think the reason I”m pulled up short, at times by Shantaram is because it’s more than just a slick crime and caper fugitive novel/memoir. Elements of culture and class come into play in his observations, and the characters who surround him. The way he can move between the slum and the million-dollar black market mafia crime world, unquestioned, and unquestioning, has made me pause a few times as I read. His facility with language is lovely though- particularly the descriptions of Bombay and its people. This is an engrossing escape novel, for author, characters, and reader.
