SHARTARAM by Gregory David Roberts

This was truly a terrible book!  OK, so why did I follow it through 40 hours of recordings?  The book did hold my interest, it portrayed some interesting places in the world (assuming the portrayals were accurate), and it was sometimes funny.  If considered as camp, the entire book could be considered funny – though I’m not sure that was how this was intended.

I picked out this book at random from the Audible website.  There were some warning reviews that this wasn’t “worth the money”.   But it had a few redeeming qualities.

Our hero – Shantaram, but called “Lin”, is an escaped convict from Australia.  He has traveled to India on a forged New Zealand passport.  The explanation for this criminal life is only barely sketched in, and is slightly less than convincing.  He has lost his family somehow (I think perhaps his wife left him), and he turns to heroin as an escape.  In order to support his heroin habit, he turns to armed robbery.  He is caught and sent to an Australian prison, where he is beaten unmercifully.  He accomplishes a spectacular escape from this maximum security prison, and then becomes one of the most wanted men in Australia!

In Bombay, India, he falls in with a group of expatriates and with a jolly Indian tour guide. When he is evicted from his apartment, the tour guide arranges for him to live in a hut in the slum. 

Lin is a man that apparently can do almost anything.  He spends six months with the family of his Indian friend, where he learns the native languages.  He falls in love with a mysterious Swiss woman who grew up in the United States, Carla.  Their ridiculous romance is one of the underlying themes of the book.  He does NOT get the girl – but of course, we knew that when he made all kinds of dumb mistakes in the relationship.

When Lin returns to the slum, he becomes the slum’s doctor!  But then he runs afoul of Madame Chou, who runs an exotic whorehouse.  She arranges for him to be arrested and thrown into a terrible Indian prison, where he endures frightful beatings and privation.  He doesn’t learn until much later in the book who had had this done to him – only a “foreign woman”.  Never mind that it was perfectly obvious to anyone reading the book.

After getting out of prison, he becomes involved with the “Indian mafia”, learning money-laundering, gold smuggling, etc.  But these are good crooks, of course, as they don’t engage in drug trade or prostitution. 

It becomes obvious, however, that the leader of the mafia has other plans for Lin.  He recruits him to accompany a group to Afghanistan, where they will deliver supplies to the fighters against the occupying Russians.  Lin barely escapes falling off his horse off a cliff.  His group is almost wiped out by attacks from Russians, unfriendly Afghans, frigid weather, and, finally, near starvation.

The book is told in the first person, read by someone with a great Aussie accent. 

THE KICKER:  I try not to read reviews of the book until I have written up my own impressions.  Now I find that the author based most of this on his own experiences.  He was in fact a heroin addict and bank robber after his wife left him, did escape from an Australian prison, and was “most wanted”!  He also apparently did all the other things I’ve listed above, and more! 

But my feelings about his presentation of all this remain the same – no one is that good!