| This, in capsule form, is what reviewers and readers have been saying about Gregory Roberts' slab-sized Shantaram, a thinly fictionalised account of the author's life as a forger, a bank robber, a jailbird and finally, a free man. |
| Shantaram is a sweeping evocation of the slums and the bhailog of Mumbai, which explains in part why it's likely to do very well in India. The book that Francois Mauriac was talking about is its granddaddy "" Henri Charriere's Papillon, first published in 1970. |
| More than 40 years separate Charriere's experience of prison life and Gregory Roberts' story of survival, but they're both examples of how to write the classic prison novel. |
| Roberts began writing Shantaram when he was in solitary confinement. The manuscript was destroyed by a sadistic prison guard: forgiving that guard was an important victory for him in his struggle to survive the experience of being imprisoned. |
| He had to rewrite the book "" all 900-odd pages of it! "" from scratch. Charriere's epiphany came when he discovered Albertine Sarrazin's L'Astragale; the book had sold 123,000 copies. |
| As his translator, Patrick O'Brian, recounts, Charriere's reaction was immediate: "If that chick, just going from hideout to hideout with that broken bone of hers, could sell 123,000 copies, why, with my thirty years of adventures, I'll sell three times as many." (It did.) Charriere wrote 5,000 words a day: O'Brian, like many critics, regarded Papillon as a piece of oral literature committed to paper, where the tale and the immediacy of the telling was more important than the writing per se. |
| Roberts' story has the same quality, as though a latter-day Marlowe with prison tattoos had unreeled a longer than average after-dinner yarn. |
| "The men standing at the sides flattened their backs against the walls instinctively: The Standing Babas rocked themselves out of the madman's path. The door behind us was locked shut. There was no escape. We were unarmed. The man walked on towards us, waving the sword in circles over his head with both hands. There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do, but to fight him. I took one step back with the right foot, and raised my fists. It was a karate stance. Seven years of martial arts' training pulsed and flickered in my arms and legs. I felt good about it. Like every other tough, angry man I knew, I avoided fighting until it came to me, and then I enjoyed it." |
| It's hard to find a really good prison novel. The quality of literature produced by many former inmates is just as variable as the quality of literature found in the average slush pile. |
| It's a rare man "" and it is usually a man "" who can summon up the combination of honesty, discipline and craft necessary to weave a collection of vivid experiences into a book. An example of how not to do it is Push by "Relentless Aaron", which features a hit man and a foxy lady called Asondra. |
| Aaron had all the right credentials: he knew the streets, he'd done his time, he had the characters at his fingertips. But push comes to shove when you read the book, which stands out in my mind as one of the most incoherent pieces of fiction that have come my way, no mean feat in a particularly thankless year for the novel. |
| Relentless Aaron and the hundreds of other former convicts who take to writing fall short of the standards set by Donald Goine, the legendary chronicler of ghetto life who wrote over 16 novels, became a hip-hop cult figure, and was fatally shot in 1974. Goine was an amateur compared to Roberts, whose style may wobble between lyrical and laconic, but who never fails to entertain. |
| In some cases, ethical problems prevent publishers from signing up prison literature: the law in most countries prohibits a murderer or a rapist, say, from profiting from his crimes. |
| In these instances, it's left to a Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) or a John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) to strip bare the anatomy of evil. |
| Aside from Charriere, Roberts can lay claim to heavy-hitting literary ancestors "" Jean Genet, for instance, who was unjustly accused of thieving as a child and resolved to be what he was called as an adult. |
| Perhaps the most famous literary jailbird, aside from Oscar Wilde, incarcerated in Reading Gaol after the infamous homosexuality trial, was John Bunyan, who went to prison for somewhat different reasons from Roberts and Charriere (the latter was jailed for a murder he said he hadn't committed). |
| Bunyan was imprisoned for preaching publicly without a license and wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress while he was enjoying the hospitality of the authorities. Jack London did his time, too: he was jailed for 30 days for vagrancy, time he spent loading barges on the Erie Canal. |
| Daniel Defoe drew the background material for Moll Flanders from firsthand knowledge, and you could make a case for suggesting that a desert island is the ultimate in solitary confinement. |
| Defoe served several prison terms, usually sparked off by the incendiary nature of the pamphlets he wrote. His response to being set in the pillory was to recite "A Hymn to the Pillory". According to some accounts, the crowd responded well, showering him with flowers rather than rotten tomatoes or stones. |
| I'm not sure that Shantaram will emulate the success of Papillon, but it is at least as good a read. And Gregory Roberts is a rarity in the ennui-prone literary world where every shred of moderately interesting work experience is dredged up to make the author seem like a truly fascinating human being. |
| Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has delighted readers for years with his resume summary: his blurb copy used to mention that he saw his first corpse three hours after starting as a journalist, "work experience meaning something in those days". He should ask Roberts about his definition of work experience some day. nilroy@lycos.com |
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