I was pleased to find out,
through no great detective work it must be said, that Gregory David Roberts had
written a second book, with a third planned but as yet unrealised, and I sought
the opinion of an old friend and long-time Shantaram advocate as to the merits
of The Mountain Shadow. His faint praise totalled a damning, “I thought it wasn’t
too bad.”
I went in therefore with my eyes open, and wasn’t disappointed when Roberts quickly started living up (or down) to my expectations.
Shantaram was a surprising and often thrilling read, despite all of the things wrong with it – the overt but unacknowledged white male privilege on show, the teeth-grindingly facile portrayal of the humble and honest natives, the emetic prose and cod philosophy – and despite being 900-odd pages long, it created a vivid and believable Bombay in which Lin and his friends had adventures, and did naughty things but with the best of intentions. It was fun, despite the gritty, violent and morally questionable antics, and this reader was happy to suspend his innate distaste for the laboured and cringey prose which at times threatened to derail the thrusting narrative for the sake of the thrusting narrative.
The Mountain Shadow in contrast is terribly earnest. Roberts seems keen to proselytize his philosophy which, if it is to be believed, was honed during contests of aphorism with the elusive Karla and in conversation with the various father-substitutes who provide gravity for Lin in both of the novels. Unfortunately, his philosophy is at best trite and at worst indecipherable – here’s a quick offering to support this conclusion:
The fall and summit within, what we do, and what we choose to become, are ours alone, as they should be, and must be.
Imagine me puffing out my cheeks and sighing heavily.
His ideas around the movement towards complexity in evolution are thought-provoking, but their repetition is interminable. His exchanges with the guru on the mountain are often downright tiresome, and the contests with Karla have all the verbal charm of actual diarrhoea. As a result of this earnestness, the remainder of the novel suffers, as though he expends all his creative energy in the capture of his world-shattering insights, leaving the characters less vivid and believable, and prey to lazy stereotyping just to keep things moving along. It’s also clunky and irritating. Ironically, this book is less complex than his first, suggesting not a progression of his art but a regression.
Before I bought a copy, I did check out his website (which now appears to be a self-congratulatory blog filled with more of the same ball-achingly awful nonsense), where he made bold claims about the unforgiving editing his novel underwent as part of the official publication process, urging readers instead to purchase the e-book direct from him – the directors cut if you will. I didn’t bother, but it does beg the question what the fuck did they find to cut that was worse than what was already in the publication-approved version? And it still comes out at over 850 pages long.
Here comes the feedback sandwich though. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy large parts of it. I am not sorry I’ve read it. I will probably pick up the third installment of the trilogy, which I understand will cover his time in Australia before he flees to India. It has rewards in equal measure to those aspects which I find particularly grating. As a result, I am genuinely interested to hear other people’s views on the book, so if you have an opinion, do let me know in the comments below. Maybe I can stand to be educated.
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