On the other hand, Roberts is too transparently determined to write a big book ambition is also his central weakness. On the one hand, he has undeniably created a genuine universe, a teeming underbelly of larger-than-life characters with their misbegotten schemes and drifting lives. Roberts’s ambition will seem either admirable, or deeply annoying. A certain generosity of spirit (or at least a good night’s sleep) is required to wade through the pages and pages of cursing, the paragraph upon paragraph of frequently stilted tough-guy dialogue. What a reader makes of “The Mountain Shadow” probably depends on the mood in which she approaches it. Although he has repeatedly insisted that his books are fictional, few authors can write as authoritatively about the anguish of confinement, the terror of a prison riot or the psychology of rotten cops. He has been described as Australia’s most wanted criminal. Roberts was a convicted armed robber who escaped from prison in Australia. The book glistens with the shine of firsthand experience. The narrative is for the most part lively, occasionally gripping.

(A waiter is described as being “uneponymously named Sweetie” “riding a motorcycle is velocity as poetry” “happiness was a cheetah, running free in a savanna of solace.”)īut there are also grounds for praise. The prose remains clunky, at times cringe-inducingly so. “Shantaram” spanned more than 900 pages this book comes in at 873.

“The Mountain Shadow” is similar to its predecessor in other ways. The story begins with Lin’s return to Mumbai from a smuggling trip we follow him through a thinly plotted litany of killings and violent encounters as he seeks to reunite with his love, Karla (also a repeat visitor from the earlier book). The book is populated by several of the same characters (notably Lin, also known as Shantaram), and it unfolds on much the same urban landscape of drug lords, corrupt police and washed-out expatriates. A sequel in a planned tetralogy of novels, it is likely to please many “Shantaram” fans. “The Mountain Shadow,” Roberts’s second novel, appears more than a decade later. The book has gone on to occupy a distinctive - and deserving - place in an emerging genre of Bombay noir. Hollywood rights were scooped up (though a film has yet to be made).

The book nonetheless possessed a grittiness and vividness that helped Roberts sell four million copies around the world. Literary purists scoffed at its purple prose Indian (and many other) readers bristled at its stereotypes and cultural simplifications. Gregory David Roberts’s “Shantaram” was an unlikely publishing sensation.

Author gregory david roberts