Shantaram: finished

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. That in itself is a significant compliment, since I do not finish most books, especially novels, that I start reading, and Shantaram is 933 pages long. I see on Amazon.com that it has attracted 79 reviews to date, and every reviewer apparently gives it a full five stars--the top rating. I too would give it five stars. Mr. Roberts must feel very gratified at such a response; any writer would.

Although I would issue a five-star rating, the novel has its problems, as does any book. I have talked about some of my reasons for enjoying this book in previous posts, such as here and here. There is much to admire. First, and most of all, Roberts's view of life as important: an arena where important things happen. He confronts issues such as love, evil, death, torture, and redemption head-on, and presents a world where these things plausibly arise: India (especially Bombay) of the 1970s and 80s, and in particular its underworld of poverty and crime--a world that Roberts knows at first hand from the time he spent there on the lam from the Australian authorities after escaping from prison there.

Second, his characters. Shantaram is densely populated with characters (I had a hard time keeping track of them all), and they are all vividly presented. Indeed, there is a superabundance: characters would be introduced with powerful descriptive strokes, and then would hardly appear in the story again. It's as though Roberts can't resist giving each character his or her poetic due, even if they are but walk-ons in his story. His main characters are impressively realized, multidimensional, and capable of unexpected words and actions. He sees them all through a certain romantic haze, especially the women, who are mostly beautiful, although always in very individual ways: they are people first, unlike the routine eye-candy of the typical bestseller. It's as though the main character and narrator Lin is enchanted with women and unable to describe them in any other way but as one enchanted. An example:

Ulla was dressed for work in a small, tight, black, halter-neck dress, fishnet stockings, and stiletto-heel shoes. She wore eye-dazzling fake diamonds at her throat and ears. The contrast between her clothing and Lettie's was stark. Lettie wore a fine, bone-coloured brocade jacket over loose, dark-brown satin culottes, and boots. Yet the faces of the two women produced the strongest and most unexpected contrast. Lettie's gaze was seductive, direct, self-assured, and sparkling with ironies and secrets, while Ulla's wide blue eyes, for all the make-up and clothing of her professional sexuality, showed nothing but innocence--honest, vacuous innocence.

That's all fine with me: I positively like the romanticism of Lin's character, and pretty much share it myself. I found myself wishing he'd do more with some of the characters--but that's another issue.

Third, Roberts fills his book with authentic incident and detail: his world rings true. And it is a phantasmagoric, exotic world, gorgeous, grim, and fascinating. Roberts exudes authority, which is always riveting. It's a novel, but these are things he has witnessed.

(Shantaram, by the way, is a name bestowed on Lin by the women in the village where he stays for a few months. It means "man of peace".)

My main hesitation with the novel is, as always, at the level of story. It is actually a mystery plot: Lin eventually wants to learn the truth about two of the most important characters in his life: the Swiss-American beauty Karla, with whom he is in love, and the Muslim mobster Khader, who takes Lin under his wing and introduces him to the criminal world of Bombay. The story is actually quite simple, and it develops only very slowly. Lin has his hands full with many urgent things in the meantime. Lin himself, wrapped up in his own world, is slow to realize that he lacks important information about those around him, so he is not really a sleuth. It's more that information is delivered to him when he is ready for it, the final pieces not till the end. I found this structure a bit contrived, a bit far-fetched, and also a bit underpowered. It does move slowly--I suppose like the Ganges.

There is much more that could be said about this book--and maybe I will. Despite my quibbles, it puts in the shade just about everything else being written now, as far as I can tell. My survey of the bookstore, in which I wound up buying Shantaram, certainly suggested as much. How many of us writers have been addicted to heroin, robbed banks, been imprisoned, escaped, lived in a Bombay slum, worked for the Bombay mafia, fought in Afghanistan, or been tortured in an Indian prison? I sure haven't--but Gregory David Roberts has. Such a man has something to say, and in Shantaram he's said it.

evil: an introduction

Reading period last night: Shantaram, and a book that arrived in the mail the day before yesterday, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy F. Baumeister. Mmm--who wouldn't want to get inside that?

Evil is important to my story. It's not particularly a story of good vs. evil, as in a crime melodrama, but rather the issue of evil, its source and its continuing appearance in the world despite ostensible divine rulership, is central to religion in general and to the evolution of Judaism in this period in particular. Increasingly, scholars of that period are recognizing that there were two main streams of Judaism: the Mosaic stream, based on the laws of Moses and the Torah he revealed to the Israelites; and the Enochic stream, based on the revealed teachings of the patriarch Enoch, who was taken to heaven and given instruction and heavenly tablets directly by angels. Enoch never died; he was simply taken up to heaven while still alive. The Mosaic stream eventually became rabbinic Judaism and the foundation of the religion as it exists today. The Enochic stream was the source of the Essenes and other Jewish groups who were less connected with Mosaic Judaism.

Enoch taught that evil entered the world by way of angels who rebelled against God. In particular, a certain group of angels became infatuated with human women, and mated with them to produce giant offspring who in turn caused all kinds of trouble. These rebellious angels taught humans various things that helped perpetuate evil (as they saw it) in the world, in particular weapons for war and adornments for women to make them irresistible to men, thus promoting fornication and sex in general. In the process, the whole cosmic order as established by God was contaminated, and could not be cleansed again until the end of time, when God would cause evil and its agents to be destroyed so that the original paradise could be restored. The rebel angels became demons, and their leader would become the figure we know as Satan.

In contrast, the Mosaic stream did not mention a rebellion by angels, and for the most part did not emphasize Satan or his role in world history. In the garden of Eden the first humans were tempted to disobey God, setting a precedent for humanity: people would continually disobey God and suffer the consequences. In this context evil is not so much an active enemy of God and the good, but the giving in of individuals to the temptation to sin.

So what is evil? I wanted to find out more, so I bought Baumeister's book, and one or two others (not here yet). He is setting out to explain evil from a psychosocial perspective, using factual data (that is, only real-world examples, not fictitious ones that are often used to illustrate evil and its operation). One of his first points is that actual evil--the way it actually happens in real life, and the attitudes of its perpetrators--is strikingly different from evil as it is portrayed in stories. Far from being cruel, sadistic types who take pleasure in hurting, most evildoers are bland functionaries, people who lack strong emotions about what they do and generally have a workaday attitude. Perpetrators of large-scale evil find themselves fussing with details of how to get more bodies crammed into ovens or how to optimize the use of ammunition for mass shootings.

All very interesting. Baumeister makes the point that evil is largely in the eye of the beholder, particularly in the eye of the victim, since perpetrators never see their own actions as evil. Personally, I find this hard to accept. While it's true that perpetrators may not see their own actions as evil, this doesn't make evil a subjective thing. Surely the Golden Rule is the touchstone for evil: how would I like this to be done to me? What if you were the torturer and I were the one strapped to this rack?

This topic, again, is vast. Think I'll go read some more on it.

philosophy and fiction

Still in the late stage of my cold, but my head is relatively clear. Kimmie, on the other hand, is in full-blown acute nasopharyngitis, and home from work today. She putters upstairs, wrapping Christmas presents.

Yesterday, after my post about my interest in learning more about evil and buying a book online about it (that order got canceled; had to order another copy from a different seller in Carlsbad, California), I picked up the novel Shantaram at teatime and read chapter 23. I was surprised to discover that the chapter was centered on a long discussion of evil between the protagonist Lin and the Bombay crime-boss Khader. I had a strong feeling of meaningful coincidence--of things being brought together for me at exactly this time, because I need them now.

As I make my way through Shantaram I am developing ever more respect for its author, Gregory David Roberts. I continue to enjoy the book and even, recently, felt a slight temptation to keep reading after I had finished a chapter--something I probably haven't felt (for a novel) for 20 years! (I didn't give in; I would have been reading only for information--to find out what happens--and it would no longer be an aesthetic experience. Occasionally I will indulge this urge with nonfiction, since I am usually reading that only for information, but even then I find that my enjoyment of a book quickly tails off. Usually I prefer simply to switch books in order to keep the reading experience fresh-feeling.)

As I read chapter 23 I recognized that Roberts takes his philosophy seriously: that one of his self-descriptors in the novel's second paragraph ("a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime") was not a mere throwaway but an earnest statement of a major interest of his. In this chapter Khader, the fatherly, intellectual, Muslim mafia boss, who bestows teachings and blessings on his many clients and underlings in the manner of an Asian holy man, expounds his own philosophy of evil as relating to the modern science of complexity and the scientific concept of the tendency toward complexity: good is that which works with the universe toward greater complexity; evil is that which works against it. It was an interesting, serious take on evil, and Roberts spent a good number of pages on it as Lin tried to understand what he was being told. At the same time it was part of the character dynamic unfolding between Lin, the fugitive convict who has severed his past life from himself, and Khader, an adoptive father-figure. How can a crime-boss be dispensing spiritual teachings? I don't know--but he can, and he does.

It is just one of countless paradoxes of the Indian world that Roberts portrays. And Lin is his own kind of paradox: a dried-out drug addict, violent criminal, and street-fighter who is also ingenuous, romantic, and poetic. If he were written in the third person he might be impossible to accept: for he is almost impossibly heroic in many ways (defying oppressors, saving people's lives, doing acts of great selflessness and generosity). But as a first-person character Lin conveys a believable sense of no-big-dealness to his actions. Aware of his dark side, he feels no special pride in his light.

So: at 497 pages in I am enjoying Shantaram just as much as I did on page 1--a rare occurrence. Doubly so, considering that the novel, for its size, is structurally rather simple and slight. There are a couple of simple story-questions on the go--the things we want to find out--but they proceed slowly, slowly. Roberts, like India, is in no rush, and has countless wonders to unfold to the visitor en route. It's as though the real story is about Lin's salvation, but Lin himself has no awareness of this, so the narration is all about the phantasmagoria of his existence--the heavens and hells visited by the soul on its way to its destiny.

The day slips away. Think I'll do some more reading right now.

from notes to authority

More rest last night, thanks, I think, to a Sleep Aid. That took me up until 3:30 anyway.

So, yes, still have a full cold. Last night it developed quickly into the runny-nose and occasional-cough stage. I'm still groggy and have low energy. But you know, today I again did an OK day's work (by my standards). Once more it was a matter of going in with no expectations: whatever I might get done is gravy, so it doesn't really matter what I do. Lethargically, but then sometimes also less lethargically, I wandered from file to file, reading background material that I'd keyed months or even years before (I've been working with Word files on this project since 2003). The distilled notes from research books I would read, slowly, and then copy portions of those to drop into my notes document for chapter 20.

I will start by wondering about the motivation for a character, and then realize that to know that I need more knowledge of my world. Back to the research material.

"Hmm," I thought, sipping at my grapefruit juice, "this stuff is pretty interesting."

My notes document is now 24 pages long--most of it research extracts. Here is a list of the works that I have extracted from to drop into the document, as possibly relevant:

• Caesar Against Rome
• Chabad.org (website)
• From the Maccabees to the Mishnah
• Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian
• Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews
• Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans
• A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ
• A History of the Jews in Babylonia
• The Jews Under Roman Rule

Here is where I think back to when I first read Frank Herbert's Dune as a teenager. I really enjoyed the sense of his knowledge about his fictional galaxy, and venturing into (for sci-fi at that time) not-so-common spiritual and religious territory. I liked the idea of a Space Guild and the Bene Gesserit and some company called CHOAM that bigwigs had shares in. There was a sense of historical depth and conflicting interests. This is what I seek for my own work.

The issue is authority: that which an author has. In the end, nothing is more interesting than being talked to, in well-formed prose, by someone who knows what they're talking about. The literary critic Wayne Booth in his The Rhetoric of Fiction talks about the techniques of persuasion (rhetoric) used by novelists to help their readers suspend disbelief and accept as actual what is going on in the story. For me, a well-observed setting and well-observed characters are probably the crucial element.

As an example, the novel Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts that I'm still reading (a chapter a day; I'm on page 418): for the past couple of chapters his protagonist, Lin, has been incarcerated in the Indian prison system. Aside from causing me to form the intention that that never, ever happens to me, his treatment of it displays all the marks of authority. I have reason to believe that Roberts has indeed been inside the Indian prison system, but if he hasn't, he writes about it with an insider's authority. Real-feeling settings and characters make sense while also being utterly unexpected. This is the opposite of cliche, which gives us only what we expect (Irish cops; goodhearted but downtrodden immigrants; frosty condescending rich people). If asked my image of an Indian prison, I might have pictured a crowded, dirty place with a bunch of tough but morose inmates. Roberts paints a picture that does include much more crowding and filth than I would have dared to suppose, as well as tough, morose inmates, but much more as well: the way viciousness and compassion coexist, along with entrepreneurialism and the most ruthless Darwinism. The prisoners sort themselves into five groups, a rigidly stratified society of hundreds of men living in just a few square meters.

In short: his knowledge of his exotic world alone makes for gripping reading. This is the kind of authority I aspire to. It's not actually possible in a work of historical fiction; it can only be simulated. But I believe the reader accepts this limitation as part of the price of admission. I do, anyway.

My future readers: I'm trying to make it good, I really am.

Shantaram: midcourse reader's report

Outside, a thin layer of snow, growing ever so gradually thicker as tiny flakes flutter thinly down.

Last night I finished Part One (of five) of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, the Australian convict-turned-Bombay-slum-dweller-turned-novelist. I'm on page 169 of 936 of the St. Martin's Griffin trade paperback, and I'm happy to report that I'm enjoying the read.

It's not because of the storytelling, because I think that Roberts is not a particularly experienced or trained storyteller. In 169 pages we have had only a handful of events that could be called plot-points. In many ways the real story seems to have begun only on page 142, when the narrator-protagonist, the escaped New Zealand convict Lin (who has been given the name Shantaram, "man of peace", by newly made Indian friends) gets mugged, leaving him both penniless and unable to approach the authorities for help, due to his criminal status. With this, the character acquired what could be called a true story problem, with the arising in this reader's mind of the question, Uh-oh, how's he going to deal with this?

What keeps me reading is that other aspects of the book are so strong and so unusual. For one thing, there's the knowledge that the story is mainly autobiographical, so there is the sense of realism and unexpectedness in the world he portrays. Roberts writes with apparent authority about India--a place I know little about, and have mainly stereotypical ideas about. I find my stereotypical ideas about India being bulldozed again and again as I read: a truly pleasurable experience, since we don't read things just to find what we expect. We want authentic novelty, and Roberts serves this up nonstop. Roving from downtown Bombay to an Indian village to a city slum, Roberts gives a vivid, closely observed, firsthand account of his impressions. They register as authentic, and lend his book that quality I so admire that I call richness: the sense that the details available to the writer are vastly more numerous than what he is able to show, and so the ones presented suggest the many others not expressed.

Next: his characters and characterization. These are very good: the characterizations are vivid and unexpected. He is able to portray Indian characters as genuine and yet very non-Western people, a continual thrill to read. I am reminded more than anything of reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry back in 2001--another large novel about India, by a native Indian. Roberts's work compares favorably so far.

One of the most appealing aspects of the book is its tone. Roberts is writing about a tough, streetwise, fugitive criminal who finds himself among the Indian underworld. What I expect is tough, gritty writing with a menacing, violent edge. What I get is a tough world seen through sensitive, poetic, and even romantic eyes. Lin (and Roberts I suppose) is intensely romantic, romanticizing people and places (as for instance his description of the Swiss-American woman Karla that I extracted in an earlier post). Again and again he seems to have the experience of what James Joyce called "aesthetic arrest"--the sense of being stopped in one's tracks by an experience of beauty, and moved to a higher plane of seeing such that one is able to create genuine art. Roberts's descriptive art is not at Joyce's level, of course, but he gives it all he's got again and again. He goes for it. I like it: his tone is not "sophisticated", but it's perceptive and intelligent and passionate. He's a sincere man who's had strong experiences and is reporting them to us.

The character Lin himself is an asset. He is, like all good protagonists, a contradictory character. He embodies the qualities of criminal toughness and poetic romanticism, and this makes him ever interesting. He narrates as though he is a simple, uncomplicated guy, an observer, rather self-deprecating, and yet again and again I have been surprised by him. My own view is that, possibly because Lin is based on Roberts himself, Roberts has underestimated Lin's uniqueness and paradoxical qualities, with all the power these suggest for storytelling.

Lastly, and most importantly for me, Roberts narrates with the conviction that life is a place where important things happen: that what we do and feel and believe matter. Life is where our values are discovered and tested, often at great cost. He is an antidote to the frivolity of the great mass of contemporary fiction-writing. Though light in tone and often funny, he takes life seriously. I appreciate that, because I'm dying before too long--and so are you.

A perfect book? No, far from it. But page for page, Shantaram compares favorably with what else is out there. Roberts suffered to write this book (written over 13 years, largely in prison, with Roberts's blood literally on the paper), and the result is accordingly worth our attention. No regrets.

the writer shops for a novel

The dark days of the year are here. The fog has lifted, leaving everything dark and wet and still. I turned my errand of cash-fetching at an ATM into a short jog, and ran around Victoria Park. The dark clouds were trying to rain as I walked off my run, but they are still only pregnant with rain.

Kimmie's colonoscopy went well yesterday: the doctor gave her the all-clear, and so whatever was paining her in her abdomen is of still unknown cause. The doctor feels that it's within the bounds of normal experience and is not concerned. Meanwhile, Kimmie is assured for now that there is no sign of cancer, which struck down her brother Freddie.

While Kimmie was in the tender hands of the St. Paul's GI Clinic staff, I walked along Burrard and Robson, winding up again at Indigo Books. This time I determined to search for a novel. Fiction is on the third floor, so I rode the escalators up there and started looking. My first impulse was to look in the science-fiction section. Why? Probably because what I'm looking for is to leave this world: to see how other writers handle the depiction of an imagined other place. Partly this is defeatism, though, because I expect all novels to be disappointing, and so want to have some imaginative verve as compensation for putting up with a basically unenjoyable reading experience. Isn't that a negative stance?

Pushing aside my defeatism, I strode to the "fiction/literature" shelves: the large section of general fiction. Starting at the As, I worked my way along the book-spines and covers. I held my gloved hands behind my back, only looking. No touching unless something looked at least a little bit interesting. Margaret Atwood--nope. Peter Aykroyd--nope. Jilly Cooper--nope! On...

I wanted to find historical fiction, if possible, to compare with my own work. At some point I'm going to have to compare my work to others', and I'll need to know what's out there. I find this thought tiresome. "What will your work remind me of?" "Picture the Shopaholic books, but written by Thomas Pynchon."

Shelf after shelf. Shelf after shelf. Here I am, people--I'm here to spend. Make me. C'mon...

Hmm...what's this? My first pickup: a big Penguin paperback called The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett. Say, this looks not bad. Nice cover. Hm, part of a series, I see--dangerous, but also potential (series to me suggest cranked-out, repetitive work--but I'm planning one myself so I'd better not carp!). Penguin: I still associate this imprint with quality, and indeed British writers I regard as over all better than American or Canadian. Slight problem: it's set in the 16th century, a period I don't have any particular fondness for. Flip it open, read the first paragraph, the first page.

I don't exactly remember the first paragraph (I didn't get the book), but I was a little leery of its suggestion that the main character (or the character being introduced) was a kind of swashbuckling rake, back in the country after unspecified adventures. It feels kind of standard. The writing itself, though, was good, far from the schlock that is usually dished up as historical fiction. Should I? It's a big book--but I like that (if it's good). Hmm. I flipped to a couple of passages in the middle. I settled on one: a rapid narrative of some kind of forest campaign, in which large actions were summarized in brief sentences. This put me off. Combined with the opener, which again was an overview rather than a specific action of one character (it was along the lines of, "When news of So-and-So's return started circulating through the country, people could hardly believe it..."), I felt I was getting too much summary and not enough drama. Nah, I thought--it's too risky. I put it back.

(Now that I've checked the Amazon.com listing for this series of books, I see that every one of them gets 5 stars or 4.5: the reviews are stellar. I'd better go back and read this after all!)

Listlessly I trailed among the shelves. Back, forth. Nope. Nope. Nope.

I went past another biggie: a novel called Shantaram by someone called Gregory David Roberts. It had an Asian-looking design on its gold cover. I picked this up too. The back cover contained reviews of praise, but no plot summary. Odd. The striking thing was Roberts's own story, which occupied the largest paragraph on the back, next to his photo:

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay--where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release. Roberts is now a full-time writer and lives in Bombay.

Well. One thing's clear: I sure have a tame bio. I assessed the physical book. Hm, big trade paperback, 936 pages including two pages of acknowledgments at the back. The book appeared to be based closely on his life--that could be good. How does a junkie/robber/Bombay street soldier write? Let's find out. First-sentence test, chapter 1:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.

Hm--is it good? Or a "hey notice me!" grabber? I'll read on:

I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Good. For one thing, this writer is not among the great majority who share the same dismal characteristic: they write as though life were a pointless waste of time. He sees life and experience as the arena of important things: values. That makes him my kind of guy up front. I was willing to read more:

In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison.

Good. I could see why such emphasis was put on Roberts's bio; without it, these lines would raise huge credibility issues. With it, though, they command attention. I get the feeling that although I would never want to live Roberts's life, here in this book I have the opportunity to learn from it, because he has himself. I was mostly sold at this point.

But it was so big, and relatively expensive (trade paperback: $19.95), that I wanted more security. I flipped ahead to other passages. Here's the second paragraph of chapter 2, in which he's describing a Swiss girl named Karla whom he meets in Bombay:

And I did--I liked everything about her. I liked the Helvetian music of her Swiss-American English, and the way she pushed her hair back slowly with a thumb and forefinger when she was irritated by something. I liked the hard-edged cleverness of her conversation, and the easy, gentle way she touched people she liked when she walked past them or sat beside them. I liked the way she held my eyes until the precise moment when it stopped being comfortable, and then smiled, softening the assail, but never looked away.

That clinched it. Here I was reading someone who's probably better than I am at characterization; I can learn from this guy. He deserves to have his book bought, and I'm happy to do it. I chose a pristine copy and headed for the till downstairs.

When I got home I read chapter 1 and very much enjoyed it. Now: chapter 2.