 "Gregory David Roberts's new book remains in Shantaram's shadow")
Author: Gregory David Roberts
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 873
Price: Rs 899
There is little doubt that Shantaram was a publishing sensation. The lively characters, the florid prose, the vibrant portrayal of Bombay — Gregory David Roberts produced a page-turner that ended up selling four million copies worldwide. Loosely based on Roberts’s life, readers were left entranced by the story of an Australian convict who escaped prison and thrived in the murky, treacherous underbelly of Mumbai, first as an amateur doctor in the city’s slums and later as a passport forger for the local mafia. Even as purists sneered at its overly ornate prose, others devoured it with glee.
The Mountain Shadow, the first of the three proposed sequels to Shantaram, comes more than a decade after the astounding success of the first book. The Mountain Shadow is dominated by the several of the same characters that had so thrillingly delighted in Shantaram: Lin (also known as Shantaram), Karla, his soul mate, who is now married to a handsome Indian media tycoon, and a group of perennially-stoned, woozy expatriates.
It has been two years since the events in Shantaram. Lin returns from a smuggling trip to a city that seems to have changed too much, too soon. Many of his old friends are long gone and the new mafia leadership is immersed in a dangerous battle involving murder and drugs. The plot — much like in Shantaram — unravels in the sun-soaked, incommodious lanes of Mumbai, awash with drugs, petty criminals and nefarious police guys. The book chronicles Lin’s escapades for the Sanjay Company, which has undergone a major overhaul ever since the death of Khaderbhai, its founder, in Afghanistan. Lin later discovers that Khaderbhai had a spiritual guru called Idriss. If Shantaram saw Lin venture out on a path to seek love, spirituality and self-discovery, The Mountain Shadow gives you much of the same, just on a grander, almost unfathomable scale.
What worked for Roberts in Shantaram was his startling ability to tell a story and a quite a fascinating one at that. In The Mountain Shadow, the storytelling is muddled, bordering on the absurd in the some parts. Roberts hastily jumps from one event to another, introducing predictable characters with cliched backgrounds in between. By the end of it, you struggle to keep up with the sheer number of characters that Roberts brings to life in this enormous book. Despite its gargantuan size (almost 900 pages), Roberts strides through this one at dizzying pace, leaving you with a throbbing headache at the end.
And, the prose — enthralling in some parts — is a tad too purple for one’s liking. In Shantaram, we were introduced to Roberts’s penchant for painting the most trite things with a colourful, multi-stroked brush. Unfortunately, he spills too much colour this time.
“Riding a motorcycle is velocity as poetry,” he begins in one of the earlier chapters in the book. “...The fine balance between elegant agility and fatal fall is a kind of truth, it carries a heartbeat with it into the sky. Eternal moments in the saddle escape the stuttering flow of time, and space, and purpose.” Such hued descriptions run amok for a major part of the book.
More than the prose, it’s the random aphorisms that make you cringe. The book is replete with dictums such as “If you can’t stand the heat, then get out of the building”, which Lin incidentally spots at a Hanuman shrine. Roberts’s favourite, however, is the one he uses rather unsparingly in the book: “Writers never really die until people stop quoting them.”
Despite its various shortcomings, Roberts somehow keeps you engaged with his vivid imagination and somewhat unorthodox subplots. An expatriate is bafflingly cursed by a Hindu holy man, a private detective is investigating a matter that involves the CIA, an Irish mobster wants to kill Lin's brother, and in spite of Lin’s desperate attempts, Karla is still proving to be elusive. Somewhere in the middle, Lin also makes a brisk, pointless trip to Sri Lanka.
The book, in parts, is a rich first-hand account of a convict's larger-than-life experience in a city teeming with compelling characters. In the other parts, it is self-indulgent twaddle that is loaded with homilies and overstated life lessons. At the end of the almost 900 pages, the moralism gets too overwhelming, almost claustrophobic. Roberts tries to capture every tiny moment in such resplendent grandeur that it gets annoying after a point. Lin’s sanctimonious approach does little to help matters. Throughout the book, Lin tries too hard to portray himself as a saint, abjectly failing in the end. While the first book had Bombay as its protagonist, The Mountain Shadow is all about Lin and his inexplicable desire to forgive everyone who has done some wrong to him. Such outpouring of compassion leaves you confused.
Towards the end, after Lin and Karla are reunited, the two face off in an “aphorism contest”, hurling maxims at each other almost at will, resulting in an embarrassing turn of events. This sequence aptly sums up the book. Roberts, this time, has taken the search for love, faith and god a little too far. The Mountain Shadow could have been a thriller just like its predecessor, had Roberts not been undone by his own ambition. Here, he has delivered a part-sensational, part-middling novel that produces sporadic flashes of literary genius, only to lose steam in the end. Unfortunately for Roberts, there won't be many quoting from this one.
