THE GREY PLANE

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

Shantaram begins with the protagonist sneaking out of Australia on a flight to Bombay. Very early on, he meets a beautiful woman who advises him to surrender to India. This more than the gun smuggling, more than the prison escape, more than the Russian-Afghanistan war is what Gregory David Roberts’s book is about. This giant first novel is the portrayal of a man’s quest for understanding in a very traditional, visiting-the-Oracle sense.  Only in this version the Oracle vacillates between a Bombay Mafia kingpin named Abdel Khader Khan and a series of intense, borderline unbelievable experiences. That being said, this novel is full of these experiences that continually urge the reader to question their veracity (far more than Frey’s A Few Million Pieces). Yet, they are allegedly Roberts’s own. The author was incarcerated in an Australian maximum security prison where he did escape to India and did spend many years involved with the Bombay mafia. Those facts alone can drive the reader through the book and Roberts baits the reader with chapter openings like Chapter Twenty-Eight’s, “In my first knife fight I learned that there are two type of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill.” Ka. Pow.

What perplexes the reader is the juggling between genre-caliber action sequences (think Clive Cussler) and passage after passage of existential exposition. The mix would so easily seem incongruous, yet is delivered naturally by Roberts’s hand. I think this is why so many prior reviewers have simply said this book is about “everything.” The conceit is the author’s struggle for redemption. Roberts wrote the novel based on his Indian experiences in prison after being recaptured. The redemptive quality, bordering on heavy-handed, rewards the reader with a fuller, deeper understanding and far more insight into what might otherwise be a very foreign read.

This literary tour of India, for the book is about Bombay as much as everything else, is worth the read alone. It will be exciting to see how accurate Johnny Depp’s silver screen adaptation will be. Particularly how well the movie can adapt the content of what otherwise may be six movies crammed into one.

Ultimately, I recommend Shantaram for its insight alone. No other book has ever gone where Shantaram goes, nor goes and achieves such a complicated understanding. It is perplexing to think that one person could live through so many experiences but encouraging to think that one person could have the courage to do so.