More terrible than fiction

Heavyweight literature saved Greg Roberts’ life. We’re not talking in metaphors here. Loitering in the Princess Grace suite of the Shelbourne Hotel, a deluxe copy of Shakespeare’s collected works on the dining table jolts the Australian author’s memory into demonstrating how he used to prepare for close quarters knife fights in prison by removing all the books from the shelves in his cell, ripping off the hardback covers and taping them around his middle and onto his forearms. After the altercation, he would wash off the blood, shred the remains and flush them down the toilet. On one such occasion, when the adrenaline wore off, Roberts noticed the only book he couldn’t bear to destroy was an anthology of the bard.

Gregory David Roberts’ case history is so remarkable one might be forgiven for thinking it an elaborate literary hoax. The facts however, speak all too plainly. The story begins in the mid-70s when Roberts won a place at University in Melbourne by coming first in his exams in the state of Victoria, working a factory job by day, studying at night. As well as being a high profile social activist and anti-war protestor, he was also on track for tenure as one of the country’s youngest ever philosophy and literature professors. But the pressures of forging a career fractured his marriage, and when the mother of his five-year-old daughter won full custody of the child, resulting in minimum visiting rights for him, there began a downward spiral of depression. A social worker friend introduced Roberts to heroin, it turned out to be not so much a gateway drug as a trapdoor – the start of a 20-year fall through the underworlds of several continents. Within a couple of years, he had resorted to supporting his habit by staging hold-ups armed with a toy gun. His soft-spoken manner and suit and tie earned him the sobriquet of ‘The Gentleman Bandit.’
Captured and sentenced to ten years in prison, Roberts vowed to make the most of it, setting up reading and teaching programmes for illiterate prisoners. But after an infraction of the rules (minor, he says), he was transferred to a punishment unit known as Hell Division, where he was subjected to severe beatings. Recovering in the prison hospital, he began planning his escape, and six months later in the summer of 1980, he went over the wall between two gun towers in broad daylight.
He spent the next decade on the run as Australia’s most wanted man, fleeing to New Zealand and eventually fetching up in Bombay, India, where he set up a free first aid and diagnostic clinic in the slums. He was also recruited by the Bombay mafia, working as a forger and smuggler in Afghanistan during the Soviet Invasion and in Sri Lanka during the Indian Peace Keeping Mission. Once again picked up by the police, he spent several months in a Bombay’s Arthur Road prison, where he endured systematic whippings with bamboo canes and containment in crammed, shit-flooded, lice-ridden holding pens. A friend bailed him out after a few months, but following the death of his mentor and mafia boss, Roberts went freelance and throughout the ’80s he lived all over Europe, fronted a rock band called Kill Your Landlord in Germany and travelled as far as Nigeria and Zaire on a forged passport. He also published short stories in India’s national newspaper under a false name, taught cosmology and worked as a stunt man and actor in Bollywood movies.
He was finally recaptured in Germany in 1990, and was held in Frankfurt pending extradition to Australia, where he had seven years left to serve. On the verge of planning yet another escape, he had a moment of clarity and decided to quit all stimulants, serve out his sentence and devote himself to writing.
But his trials were far from over. Back in Australia he served two years in solitary confinement as punishment for his escape. With permission from the authorities, he began work on a book, but 300 pages into it found the manuscript shredded and stuffed down the toilet by one of the guards. After being transferred from solitary to maximum security, he started the manuscript again, but after three and a half years and another 350 pages, he returned from work in the prison factory to find the second draft also destroyed.
Years after his release, at a writer’s festival in Melbourne, the prison officer who destroyed that second draft approached him, expressing remorse and saying he’d left the prison service soon after the incident. Roberts ended up signing the finished copy and thanking him for making it a better book.
Shantaram is that book, a long (almost 1,000 pages, approximately 350,000 words), involved and frequently extraordinary novel based on Roberts’ experiences. Stylistically it’s old school: Melville or Conrad, Hemingway or Jack London. In parts it is relentless and brutalising – the section based on the author’s stay in the notorious Arthur Road prison in Bombay is nothing short of overwhelming. Here, Roberts’ writing has the power to scar, although in other places the prose sometimes errs on the side of formality.
Its author is an equally complex character. One expects a gnarled blowhard but is met by an eloquent – even verbose – character who speaks in the soft tones of a new age proselytiser.

PETER MURPHY: Going by the Arthur Road section of Shantaram, I find it hard to credit that you’re still walking around as a functioning human being. How does a person recover from the trauma of being tortured?
Art is a critical component, but I think that love is a very important aspect. I’ve always had my mother’s love, and even though I had a very conflicted relationship with my father, my relationship with my mother was always sound. I’ve known a lot of men in a lot of prisons around the world and most of them are sad men, not bad men. The vast majority don’t have that sense of certainty that no matter how damned they become or how profoundly they damn themselves, there is someone there who will always love them no matter what. In my case I always had that. In those moments when the blood is running out of your body and you think you’re going to die, it’s that love that stays with you and keeps your heart going and says don’t give up. I’ve seen soldiers dying and heard the other people around them saying, “I love you, I love you” and they don’t love the guy, they just know instinctively this is what’s gonna keep them going.
Did recording events with a writer’s eye help you to detach from experiences such as being beaten and tortured?
I’d go further than the writer’s eye and say the artist’s eye. There’s something in the artist’s sensibility that is drawn to translate that experience into something else. I’ve been in two wars, I’ve been chained up and had leg-irons in three continents, in Europe, Asia and Australia, and I’ve seen men who have perpetrated every kind of act which is described in our society as evil, I’ve known pretty much every kind of hard man there is, and I can tell you in all of those experiences of war, of being a mafia street guy, of being in a slum and being in prisons, the men and women who survived those experiences with the greatest degree of integrity of their persona, their psychological, physiological and sociological integrity, are artists. Guitar players, painters, writers, poets, actors, dancers, people who could, through an art, abstract themselves from the event, but who could also translate the horror of what they were seeing.
Can you give an example of how that worked for you?
A man in the cell next to me in the prison in Frankfurt tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, and he didn’t cut deeply enough and he started screaming out in terror, ’cos he suddenly realised, “My life is slipping from me”. He knew he was dying and he suddenly didn’t want to die, and each time he screamed he was tearing the wound, tearing the throat open a little more, so he quite literally screamed himself to death, he drowned in screaming, gurgling. I heard this and I realised what was going on because I was one of the few people who could speak German on that tier. This fellow was screaming, “I’ve killed myself”.
I started banging on the door of my cell to try to get help. I was screaming out for him to be helped, pounding on the door ’til my own fists were just bloody pulp. And I knew help was not gonna come, we’re locked up for the night and they’re not gonna come down that tier. And the men around me realised what I was doing and they started banging on their doors to try to get help for this man. And eventually his screams went silent and we knew he was gone. And when this was over and the silence resumed in the division, I sat down for a while on the floor next to the door, and then eventually got up, went to the little table in my cell, washed my hands, sat down and started to write the experience. I think if I hadn’t had the capacity to write, the urge to write, the compulsion to write, if that wasn’t my first and purest instinct, I think I would’ve died many times over.

Shantaram is published by Little, Brown