Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Do not be put off by the size of this book. Yes, it's a massive 933 pages (and only book one of a planned trilogy) but it's riveting. You might try to skip along, but you just keep getting caught in a thrilling episode of gangsterism, a sensational prison escape or a stupendous description of life in Bombay's slums.


Amazingly, this is the story of the author's life — or at least a 10-year slice of it.

Roberts began promisingly if unconventionally, as the child of Fabian socialists and humanists in Melbourne, but his life fell apart in heroin and crime and he ended up with a 19-year sentence in Victoria's maximum security prison.

In July 1980 he escaped, becoming Australia's most wanted man. He made it to New Zealand, and from here travelled (on a New Zealand passport) to Bombay. And that's really where this story begins.

Intelligent, self-aware and highly streetwise, Roberts always considered himself a writer. Constantly taking notes and keenly observing the people and places he came across, he's been able to recreate an almost shocking freshness and immediacy to events that are often beyond imagining.

He established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, supplementing his non-income with drug sales to tourists. He eventually went to work for Bombay's leading mafia figure, a man Roberts regarded as a father, uncharacteristically unaware that the situation he was involved in was even more complicated and corrupt than he had thought.

He worked as a counterfeiter and smuggler and gunrunner to Afghanistan. He was imprisoned, tortured, fell in love, found exotic friends and, sometimes, enemies, learned several languages. He flew by instinct and sometimes crashed.

Mostly though, what captures the reader's imagination is his feeling for that city, Bombay, and he's the perfect host through the stink and mayhem, the glory and the misery.

The book is part thriller, part adventure, part spiritual journey. Set firmly and wildly in the counter-culture, whatever else it is, it's a page-turner.

* Scribe, $39.95