Spilling over

Shantaram
By Gregory David Roberts
St. Martin’s Press, $24.95

And then, and then, and then … this is narrative at its most basic, the backbone that enables any story to get up and go. First one thing happens, and then another. Before you know it, you’ve got a 900-plus page-turner like Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram.

Shantaram is a big, overwritten monster. Spilling over with narrative incident, it is, by turns, part comic book, travelogue, new age memoir, ripping yarn and bodice ripper. It all but begs to be parlayed into a suitably big-screen movie. It could easily become the object of a cult following.

As literature, which is to say art, it’s not very good — but that needn’t stand in its way.

The saga of an escaped convict who reinvents himself on the teeming streets of Bombay, Shantaram derives a certain amount of its interest from a kind of built-in tease. In an afterword and his dust jacket bio, first novelist Roberts goes out of his way to suggest that the exploits of his protagonist and narrator, Lin, are actually a version of his own autobiography. To wit: Lin is a recovering heroin addict and so is Roberts; the two escaped from prison, started a free clinic in the Bombay slums, became part of the Mafia there and endured various violent scrapes. If half of this stuff is true, Roberts has had an eventful life indeed. One wonders why he felt the need to embroider upon it.

No doubt to get at some larger notion of “the truth.” Or, perhaps, to more greatly aggrandize an already inflated sense of self.

Roberts is an obsessive storyteller. There is so much he wants to tell us — about India, poverty, violence, criminal psychology, drugs, romance, Bollywood, war — his book doesn’t end so much as seem to run out of ink. Along the way he manages to paint a vivid picture of a place so exotic it might as well be a figment of his imagination.

In this, Shantaram resembles nothing so much as the works of Tolkein. Readers whose idea of great fiction is based on painstakingly detailed creations of alternative worlds are liable to find a feast in Roberts’ book, with the added frisson that large swatches of it may be true.

There is also a load of philosophizing, delivered in language that veers from being unabashedly gorgeous to maudlin with occasional stretches that read as if they’ve been pulled from an urban policymaking manual. The dialogue, throughout, seems to have been cribbed from late-night dorm room conversations at Cosmic U. In all, the effect is a barely contained weirdness that manages to keep one looking. It’s an epic gaper’s block.