Yah, yah, I know, I’ve been lollygaggin’
and work-shyin’ and leaving all my lovely spammers in Tamil Nadu with nothing
on which to post spam but old reviews. I’ve not even been all that busy, except
when it comes to slapping on weight and destroying some neural connections,
both of which I’ve done with glazed-eyed indifference and robotic monotony.
Still, I feel I owe it to GDR to at least put Shantaram to bed before I buy (whoops, sorry, already done) and
read his next book, The Mountain Shadow,
which even now is winging its way to my door by the magic of Amazon Prime Same
Day DeliveryTM.
It turns out that GDR was indeed a bit
of a knob. He robbed building societies in Australia, always dressed in a
three-piece suit and minding his Ps & Qs, and only targeting those with adequate
insurance. How he knew which did and didn’t have adequate insurance is not mentioned. On the back of
this, or maybe it was the other way around, his wife kicked him out and he lost
contact with his only daughter. This in turn lead to a significant heroin addiction.
Not really causally speaking, as he had the choice NOT to do heroin, but he chooses
to blame it all on the failure of his relationship, so, you know, if he says so…
Of course, he was caught and then boldly
made his famous escape, fleeing to Bombay/Mumbai where he spent ten years working
for the Bombay mafia, setting up a slum clinic, tripping off to war in
Afghanistan, and so forth. On the bare bones of this he hangs the fantastical
tale of Lindsay ‘Linbaba’ Ford, supposedly the name on GDR’s passport when he
arrives in Bombay/Mumbai, who funnily enough is an escaped Australian bank
robber, who fled to Bombay/Mumbai, and so on. In often floridly emetic and cod-philosophical
prose, Linbaba the narrator spews forth his love for the people and places of
the city, including his infatuation with the enigmatic whore/poet Karla
Saaranen, his friendship with a lethal gangster whose name escapes me currently*,
his love/hate relationship with American whore/Bollywood casting agent Lisa
Carter, and his pseudo dad, Khader Khan who, like all good dads, severely lets
him down. And throughout, Lin walks a tortuously thin line between self-hatred
and slum-nobility, telling us all about it along the way.
Given I’m not exactly effusive with
praise, you might think the book is a steaming pile of विष्ठा**,
but you’d be at fault for taking me seriously. In fact, taken as an adventure story, with a wide and
always colourful cast of characters including Prabaker, his Marathi guide with
the mile-wide smile, and mafia don-dad Abdel Khader Khan, it’s a fun and
thrilling, if occasionally harrowing, novel, and a fascinating insight into the
bustling multi-cultural city of Bombay/Mumbai in the 1990s. It has everything you’d
want of a novel – interesting people, exotic places, action and adventure,
suspense and drama, drugs- and gun-running, and big rats. When Linbaba is swept
up off the streets and into your worst nightmare of a prison without warning or
explanation, it also has lots of shit and piss and violence, not that violence
is confined merely to the prison.
Shantaram is genuinely worthy of the epithet ‘page-turner’, even if you’re quickly moving on past another turgid description of the soul of man which makes you want to chew your own arm off. I am actually looking forward to the sequel, I think, although at 880 pages (in paperback – his eBook version reportedly has 23 – check it, 23! – deleted scenes) I don’t know if it’ll fly to the top of my bedside pile.
And yes, I can make any praise sound like condemnation. It's a matter of principle.
Shantaram is genuinely worthy of the epithet ‘page-turner’, even if you’re quickly moving on past another turgid description of the soul of man which makes you want to chew your own arm off. I am actually looking forward to the sequel, I think, although at 880 pages (in paperback – his eBook version reportedly has 23 – check it, 23! – deleted scenes) I don’t know if it’ll fly to the top of my bedside pile.
And yes, I can make any praise sound like condemnation. It's a matter of principle.
*For more on why this was inevitable,
please refer to this list of the characters in Shantaram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shantaram_characters
**Google translate comes up trumps
again!
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