Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts
Shantaram is a book which can be approached from two angles. You could treat it as an autobiographical account of a thrilling and adventurous ten years in the life of the author, Gregory David Roberts, or you could treat it as a meditative work on the nature of right and wrong.
Roberts escaped from Australia’s highest security prison, where he was serving a long sentence for committing a string of armed robberies to pay for his heroin addiction. While on the run in Australia he gained a false passport and then flew to Bombay, which was to be his primary home for the next ten years. His life there introduced him to the poorest and the richest of the city. He established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers and brought locum doctors jobs to a place where they otherwise would’n’t have been, as well as becoming heavily involved with a branch of the Bombay Mafia.
The reader is presented with Roberts'view of the extraordinary range of situations he found himself in, and is invited to consider the moral continuity of his decisions. Rather than presenting a defence of his criminal past in Australia, and his decision to become involved with the Mafia, he explains the facts as they seem to him, and it is up to the reader to reach their own conclusions about the ethical validity of his choices. And as you can imagine these are not easy conclusions to reach. He has an obvious love for fellow humans, living in the slum with his great friend Prabakar, and providing free medical care for the thousands of dwellers who cannot afford to pay for their treatment. Yet he is willing to work for an organisation whose black market passport and currency trades fund African war lords in the despotism and tyranny of their own countries, depriving their own people of the very medical care that he provides for the population of the slum.
The honest and open manner in which Roberts writes, and the fact that the reader is not forced to pass judgement on the adventures he relates, make this book an exceptional read, rather then simply an excellent one.