TinTin Goes to Bombay

By his own account (link), Gregory David Roberts is a convicted armed robber and a prison escapee, a smuggler, a forger and a gunrunner. But he is also a published novelist so we know that, by profession, he is a con man and a liar.

Roberts' Shantaram is a 933-page doorstop (soon to be a major moving picture!--link), billed as his account of his life on the run, mostly underground in Bombay. I took Shantaram along as a companion on bumpy day-long bus rides across India last month. It was, I have to say, a decidedly mixed bag. I'll detail that point in a moment but I also want to consider a curiosity: the extent to which critics and commentators have swallowed it like a raw oyster, with little or no consideration as to how much of it might be “true.”

Tyler Cowen describes Shantaram as “one of the best bad books I have read” (link). I think Tyler needs to broaden his reading. What would he say of Balzac (say), or Dreiser, or even, forsooth, Faulkner himself?—surely all better books than Roberts’ and bad in more interesting ways.

But I grant that Roberts’ book is indeed a “bad book” in a lot of conventional senses—cardboard characterization, adolescent philosophizing, flowery overwritten romance. He bathes his narrator in almost comic self-admiration: the sensitive, passionate loner with a heart of gold. I think he is shooting for Clint Eastwood but he hits closer to TinTin.

Similarly, there are also a lot of places where I suspect Roberts simply misunderstands his material. Example: his “characters” are for the most part pretty wooden, but he seems to believe he has surrounded himself with a group of international exotics. My own guess is that the originals—and he may not have noticed—were mostly trustafarians, first-world rich kids on a lark. In the same vein, he describes his time living in “a slum.” But by his own account, it isn’t a “slum,” it’s a purpose-built work camp, noisy and chaotic but full of functional people with day jobs: they are, by almost any measure, the aristocracy of the Bombay masses. I don’t think Roberts quite grasps this irony.

But Shantaram it is more than a “bad book”—it’s a wicked book, wicked in the sense that its main purpose is to prove that Roberts the robber and drug dealer isn’t such a bad fellow after all. Sure, he did a bit of this and that (the gun was a toy, as his own website is at pains to point out). But it’s not really his fault (hint: think TV, and the outlaw Ned Kelley). Anyway politicians and big businessmen are worse (unless, inexplicably, the politician/businessman happens to be head of a big city mafia, in which case he is a saintly philosopher). And maybe a lot of his “crimes” aren’t really crimes after all: indeed at one point he seems about to articulate a defense of the black market in currency, but then he seems to say the hell with it, and changes the subject.

Perhaps most offensive, Roberts repeatedly reminds us of how much he screwed up his own life, although nowhere, unless I missed it, does he ever mention that he might have done damage to others (no, strike that, there is one elliptical reference –see p. 602).

Having said this much, I’ll grant Roberts at least one thing, maybe two. First,, he’s good at slam-bang declarative-sentence narrative. A bumpy bus ride is not the place for Kant’s Second Critique, so Robert is bumpy bus ride reading extraordinaire. This is no small achievement, and I am grateful.

Second, as with so many novels these days, there is a lot of throw-away “information” which, if it is indeed information, is quite fascinating. I love the story of how and why the lepers control the illicit pharmaceutical business (can this be a hereditary affair?). I was grimly amused by his account of the social hierarchy of the Bombay jail. I was intrigued by the “Standing Babas”—and here, I need to report, a reader has sought and found some independent verification (link).

Still there remains the nagging question of how much of all this is “true.” And here we have the curious fact. That is, skimming reviews and talking to other readers, I find that ordinary, sentient adults—people whom you might expect to harbor industrial-strength crap detectors—simply let down their guard when it comes to Roberts’ story. “Well, he lived it,” one told me, and a lot of comments join the chorus ((an honorable exception: check out “Denise” in the comments to Cowen (link).

There are two problems with this. One, so far as I can tell, we have very little independent confirmation as to how far he “lived it.” That he was a prisoner in Australia is either true or not true; also that he escaped and went to Bombay. On these primitives, I suppose that if he were lying, then someone would have blown his cover. But with so many of the other details, he might have “lived it,” and he might have heard it from others, and he might have made it up.

Or, short of that, he might simply have written some stretchers. Examples: Roberts didn’t just learn the native language; he learned two native languages, and in less than a year. He didn’t have merely to rewrite his novel after it was trashed; he had to rewrite it twice after it was trashed twice. I can’t say these things didn’t happen. But it would be interesting to hear from a third-party witness (come to think of it, if he did have to write it three times, you’d think it would be a better book: tighter and better plotted—even in novel writing, one can learn from one’s mistakes).

But two: this is a novel, frevvins sakes, and novels are not life. The “Marcel” of Remembrance of Things Past is not the “Marcel” who wrote the book. The “I” of Samarantha is not the “I” who wrote Samarantha—else why call it a novel at all? Anyway, virtually all lives—even the lives of gangsters on the run—are cursed with long stretches of boredom and anomie. But unless you aspire to be Samuel Beckett, you don’t write about boredom and anomie. You write slam-bang action-packed narrative, where something happens on every page—something for the reader will pay $15, to take on a long bus ride, to fend off boredom and anomie. God forbid that you curse is with real life.

So I can’t say I regret spending the $15, nor the time in reading—otherwise I would have been imprisoned with my own thoughts, and who needs that? But for a real account of the Bombay underworld, I think I’ll seek a second opinion.

Update: Many months later (November 29, 2008), I discover I never once referred to it as "Mumbai." How 'bout that. The insight invites more exploration, which I will give it another time.