He’s stabbed, beaten, and shot at other people, and continues to do so.

Shantaram means “man of peace,” and that’s supposedly what those characters saw in him, but he’s also a man of violence-by his own admission. He is called “Shantaram” by the family of his best friend in Bombay. However, maybe they reflect human nature more than we’d like to admit.Ĭonsider the protagonist. The protagonist and several major characters should be unbelievable, given the degree to which they mix virtue and vice, cynicism and idealism. The book excels at creating characters that are multidimensional in the extreme, but who one still finds engaging. Another book is supposed to be coming out called The Mountain Shadow, that I suspect would be the third book of this quartet. This vague background makes sense as this was supposed to be book two in a quartet. Also, he occasionally mentions the family that is missing in Australia-particularly a daughter-usually when the close nature of Indian familial relationships remind him of what he’s missing. There are occasional mentions of his heroin addiction and crimes peppered throughout the book-often delivered in doleful or apologetic moments. There’s very little backstory, except for one chapter that details the protagonist’s escape from prison. The book picks up with the lead character’s arrival in Bombay, where the gregarious convict soon makes equally vibrant friends. Most of the book is set in Bombay in the 1980s, and for many the book serves as portrait of the good, the bad, and the ugly of that city. Roberts is adamant that the other characters in the book are completely fictional, but at least some members of this cast were recognizable as real people-some of whom disagree with the accounting of events in the book. However, it’s not clear to what degree the details described in the book echo reality. Roberts had taken up armed robbery of banks and institutions to support a heroine habit.

The author, Gregory David Roberts, was-as with his lead character–an escaped convict who fled his homeland of Australia to find anonymity among the Bombay (now Mumbai) masses. The book is a novel, but mixes in autobiographical elements-at least in broad brush strokes. Shantaram is a journey through the life of a convict on the lam, a slum dweller, a prisoner in a crowded Indian jail, a de facto combat medic in the Soviet-Afghan War, and a Bombay gangster.

Shantaram book review