Yearning for the Unpredictability and Bliss of Spontaneity

And so begins the elegantly written, transcendental, deeply philosophical, page-turning blockbuster, by Gregory David Roberts, which throws the still innocent, unknowing, unenlightened reader into the deep end. While “Shantaram” may be prone to rejection due to its weighty 936 pages, it offers more life lessons, heart-racing thrill and clarity about life’s most complex, palpable questions than most likely any book you have previously picked up.

In the midst of serving a 19-year maximum security prison sentence in 1980s Australia, as a result of an impressive criminal resumé fuelled by heroin addiction, Roberts escapes from prison and flees to Bombay, India, which marks the beginning of this fictionalised account of his own experiences. Upon arrival he is re-baptised Linbaba (Lin) by Prabaker, his tour-guide become best-friend and source of pure goodness that allows Lin to begin this personal journey of virtue-realignment.

Better than any Lonely Planet guide, Roberts vividly depicts Bombay (modern day Mumbai) as a utopic melting pot of exiles and odd ones out. This is accentuated by his own friend group: an intellectually, culturally and emotionally stimulating concoction of characters, whose bond is founded in the to-become-iconic bar “Leopold’s”, which becomes a landmark of stability and comfort for Lin but also offers a breath of sobriety for the reader amidst the otherwise omnipresent craziness.

In this intriguing mould of fiction and autobiography, Roberts depicts how he managed to gulp up all the extremes in life: from the lucrative and decadent lifestyle of a gangster kingpin to being a selfless medic in a Bombay slum, soaking in the most pure form of humility; working in the Bollywood film industry to riding into war on horseback through Afghan mountain ranges; maximum security prison in Australia to the unimaginably devastating conditions of Indian prison, to his experience in Prabaker’s home village, wholeheartedly adopting the peaceful bliss that a rural Indian village provides. In between the jaw-dropping scenes, “Shantaram” is the account of a man starting a new life in a foreign city, the rewards and pains of the different relationships he fosters, and an internal struggle of self and purpose.

Roberts authentically captures your attention: he will leave you squirming in your seat with disgust and disbelief, feeling deep-found empathy through romantic desperation, laughing about the absurdity of certain situations and relationships and heart-aching with envy for his ability to capture life. Linbaba manages to encompass everything that readers who strive for experience, fulfillment and unique relationships would yearn to achieve in their lifetimes.

~ an epitome to the more subconscious messages that are laced into the fictional account of Roberts’ life, bringing to the forefront the sublime beauty of spontaneity, wrapped in a special ability to harness the idea of Carpe Diem. The multi-faceted nature of the self-depicted, protagonist, Linbaba, who is admittedly one of the more eloquent and philosophical criminals out there, pushes the reader to the limits of his or her own frontiers of consciousness. We are pressed to contemplate our own feelings of self, to explore deep personal values and morals as well as more extensive metaphysical concepts that help us make sense of the most intrinsic, innate human questions of purpose, good vs. evil and the relationship between the universe and God, to name a few.

On a more fundamental level, what Roberts consistently emphasises, even if more subtly than many of the great epiphanies, is the overpowering, and often underestimated, value of freedom, which he perceives as the underlying attribute of true happiness. Respectively, the more intimate core of the story is Linbaba’s struggle towards freedom: both in a tangible way through experiences such as his escape from prison, freeing people from sexual enslavement and liberating them of hardship and blight. Yet, in a more intangible way, he delves into concepts of freedom derived from existentialism and a profound understanding of self, although the relapsing theme of heroin and drug-addiction darkens this thought, alluding to the idea that the essence of liberation is the lucid, care-free dimension the drug places you in.

While “Shantaram” is admittedly on the brink of being bookish and overripe with its poetic and philosophical weight, Roberts somehow manages to string together the peaks and troughs into narrative harmony: a pure amalgam of profound, philosophical postulates, with a fast-paced fictional-bound, trembling frenzy of a thriller. While Roberts has the reader under his own hypnotic control, leading him/her through dimensions of self-discovery and greater metaphysical theories, he leaves many open-ended questions lurking in free space: who is the man behind the nearly confusing, fictional yet real, immoral yet sometimes so moral, character? What is the story behind his past life; his brief mentions of his daughter and his family; why is the book addressed to his mother who is never once explicitly mentioned? What is his genuine motive behind the applied mask of fiction? These are questions we can only hope to have elucidated in the following three bands in which our philosophical outlaw has promised to reappear.

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