This giant tome is the sequel to Shantaram, a 2003 epic novel by Gregory David Roberts about an escaped Australian convict who joins a gang and lives in a slum in Bombay. A mysterious figure who eschews all publicity, Roberts is widely thought to be a version of his hero.
Shantaram was consummate traveller-chic, a must-have in any guest house for backpackers, from Dublin to Delhi. In terms of quality, it was patchy — the author supposedly lost the manuscript at least three times while trying to write the novel, and it shows. But the passages about the Mumbai slums are as vividly compulsive as any thriller. A bit like a hippie Dick Francis, Roberts is at his best in a fight; the violence is far more juicy than the sex, which is modestly euphemistic, while the exact timbre of a knife blade slicing into flesh, or the particular blend of adrenaline and fear that makes a man fight, are lingeringly described.
The Mountain Shadow begins two years after the first novel ends. We’d left our hero, Lin (dubbed Shantaram or “Man of God’s Peace” early in the book), on a somewhat unexplained mission to Afghanistan, where he and his gang leader/guru were fighting in the snow and our hero had seen his only love, Karla, married to Ranjit, a Mumbai media billionaire.
In The Mountain Shadow, Shantaram finally grows up, finds a more peaceful guru up a mountain outside Mumbai and embraces “positivity”. “Love is connection and happiness is the connected self”, he intones, and “a heart filled with greed, pride or hateful feelings is not free”.
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At its worst, all this can become tediously preachy. “We fight, when we should dance. We compete, cheat and punish innocent nature. But that isn’t what we are, it’s simply what we do in the world that we made for ourselves, and we can freely change what we do, and the world we made, every second that we live.”
The philosophising feels straight out of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, with a good dose of new-age infinite connectivity — but, despite passages at the feet of the guru that seem to drag on interminably, I still found myself devouring the book.
Roberts is brilliant at creating a sense of menace and projecting the constant tension of the escaped convict, living on his wits, waiting to be murdered or betrayed at any moment. Shantaram is the kind of chap who hides extra knives at the end of his bed, always needs three escape routes and adores his motorbike as much as his girlfriend. But crucially, he is also a man who loves and understands India, the richness of its religious traditions, the quality of the light playing on a hut, the affection of the people, the tang of a well-made curry, or an exotic cocktail. It sounds ineffably cheesy, but Lin, the hard man, is full of compassion for those with nothing and writes about their lives with tenderness and joy.
If you have ever set off with your backpack, free as a bird, you will enjoy this book. As nostalgic as a chai in a Paharganj guesthouse or a trek in the Himalayas, it is nearly 900 pages of pure escape. Om shanti shanti shanti.
Little, Brown £20/ebook £10.99 pp871