Which is exactly what makes Shantaram so entertaining, such a cinematic piece of literature. In fact, the repulsion of in-carceration seems to lurk throughout the entire story, hidden coyly in metaphors until the proper plot point. Noted in the acknowledgements is that "the first two drafts of the book which took six years' work and six hundred pages were destroyed in prison," most likely by guards, whom Roberts shows a virulent distaste for in his writing. Upon his recapture in Germany, he began writing Shantaram as he served out the rest of his sentence. He ended up in Bombay, where he spent a decade treating people with various Third World ailments while making his bread 'n' butter wheeling and dealing on the local black market. Sentenced to 19 years in prison after robbing people with a toy pistol to support his heroin habit, Roberts escaped and traveled the world. Occasional overwriting is excused when the inspiration for Shantaram is understood: It's a succinctly dramatized version of the author's own life experiences, nearly as fantastic as the novel itself. Lin carries on a love-at-first-sight affair, peddles hash, saves a mafioso's nephew from a pack of wild dogs, sets up a free clinic for the poor, revives overdosing tourists in a local hotel, rescues an American hooker from having her face doused with acid, and is brutally tortured at an Indian prison and that's only halfway through the near thousand-page epic. With such a backdrop, this tale knows no boundaries, blooming with each successive page. A spiritually enlightened Aussie fugitive (really, is there any other kind?), he takes refuge in the seedy slums of Bombay, where massive fires and cholera epidemics among the 11 million are as common as the yearly monsoon rains.
Talk about a perfect place for Shantaram's hero and narrator, Lin, to hide out. In addition to bolstering tourism, Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram will do for India what Alex Garland's The Beach did for Thailand: realistically color a foreign world as an accessible frontier for adventure, intrigue, and, most importantly, new beginnings.
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