Leg-ironed on 3 continents



Jane O'Dwyer / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

"When I was chained to a wall and being tortured in an Indian prison, there was a moment I was face down thinking, 'I'm going to drown in my own blood here,' and I had to keep straining to lift my head up. There was a pool of blood and sweat and tears underneath me...and I kept trying to lift my head. There was a voice that I could hear very clearly in my head, the writer's voice that I know well, saying, 'Man, if you live through this you gotta write this down, this is damn good.'"

The next thing Australian author Gregory David Roberts says he did, after he had recovered sufficiently, was to "get a stub of pencil and a little piece of paper from one of the sugar wrappers and just start writing down my notes."

Those notes, written many years ago while Roberts was on the run, became the raw material for the epic novel Shantaram, a rollicking and beautifully written tale of an escaped criminal and former drug addict running from the law who ends up peddling fake passports for the Indian mafia in the most desperate cities in the world.

The plot is so fantastic it almost defies belief that it is based on the real-life experience of its author. But Roberts says we should not judge him only by his criminal past.

"I've been leg-ironed and chained up on three continents in maximum security prisons with some of the toughest men in the world, and I can tell you that most of them are sad men rather than bad men," Roberts told the The Daily Yomiuri by telephone from New Zealand.

"I was a writer who, through flaws in my own character when I was faced with a test of losing my own daughter in a custody case, fell apart and turned to drugs, then turned to crime," he said.

But Roberts never lost the urge to write during his fugitive years in New Zealand, India and Germany. "I was published while I was on the run. I published a series of stories under the title My Blood is Never Cold and used the pseudonym Nick Caraway, with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"I wrote the entire time that I was away, but it wasn't until I was actually recaptured [that I] could focus on a major piece of work."

As police closed in on him in Germany, Roberts had his first experience of losing his work--something that would happen twice more before Shantaram took its final form.

"I wrote a novel and novella when I was on the run, [but] I had to get out through a window when the police...were breaking the front door down and coming up the stairs. I got out a window and jumped across to another building, and ran along a rooftop. I had to leave behind the bag I was carrying, which had the novel and novella in it, and I lost them and never recovered them."

Roberts claimed to have learned a lesson from that experience, and limited himself to short stories until his capture. It was while awaiting extradition to Australia that he began work on Shantaram, a process that was to take 14 years.

Bringing 100 pages of the fledgling novel back to Australia, Roberts sought permission from prison authorities to work on his book during the two years of solitary confinement he got for escaping. Toward the end of that period, having completed 350 pages, Roberts came back to his cell from the exercise yard one day to find his manuscript torn into fragments and stuffed in a toilet bowl. He refers to the prison officer responsible as "a very harsh critic."

It was three years and another 400 pages later that Roberts once again lost his work when a prison officer destroyed the manuscript. But this time, he says, he experienced a kind of epiphany.

"I sat on the bed and looked at these torn pieces of my own life scattered around me and realized that, you know, if I did something, if I reacted...it would betray the changes that had been taking place in my life and that it would add more time," he said.

Instead of lashing out at the prison officer, Roberts thanked him for putting his new philosophy to the test because if he could forgive that, he could forgive anything.

"I told him that when I got out of prison I would write the book again and it would be a better book for it," Roberts said.

He was true to his word, finishing his novel and publishing it to critical and popular acclaim around the world. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and negotiations are under way for it to be published in Japan and China.

No longer beaten by prison officers, Roberts is now hobnobbing with Hollywood stars. After a bidding process that saw Warner Bros. pick up the film rights for the book, Roberts is slaving over a screenplay and will travel to the Bahamas later this year to work on refining the script with actor Johnny Depp, who will play the lead role and produce the film. Helena Bonham Carter and Emily Watson are also slated to appear in the picture, due out in 2007.

Roberts also plans to write three more novels based on his life. "When I decided to use the material from my own life as the material for a novel and create a narrative structure, rearrange events, bend them, twist them, take them out of their timeframe, invent characters...I realized I had enough material to do four books."

He is now working on the sequel to Shantaram, and will save the first in the series for last because it will deal with his life of crime. "I wouldn't want to cause any more harm to people than I already did or have. I paid my dues and suffered tremendously for it, but that has never removed from my own mind the shame and regret I caused them."

Given Roberts' own wild, fantastic life, the parting question has to be: Why fiction? It is in response to this question that Roberts the novelist, not Roberts the ex-con, is revealed.

"For me as an artist, there is no form or medium that is more profound or beautiful in talking about the human condition than the novel," he said.

Experience often informs the best writing, and fans of Shantaram will be eagerly waiting to see what adventure Roberts is going to take us on next.