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 1000 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 that speaks in the soft tones of a new age proselytiser. Roberts talks at length of how the structure of his book was based on Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and of how he prefers classicist techniques to the isolationist trickery of the post-modernists and deconstructionists. Frequently, the interviewer wonders how on earth this guy ended up living the life he did, and moreover, how he survived it. These days, shorn of the David Crosby moustache and with his shoulder length hair tied back, he looks almost preppy in a blue v-neck sweater and casual slacks. Except of course, he’s built like the proverbial brick shithouse. His manager Tammy fusses around, straightening his ponytail, taking photographs and dispensing glossy press packs. The casual talk is of publicity tours and film deals and world domination.

Greg Roberts always had a mother of a story for his first book. The only problem was living to tell the tale.

Peter Murphy: Given your experiences and how you’ve dealt with them, do people at readings you treat you like some sort of a guru?

Greg Roberts: Yes.

How do you deal with that?

I embrace it, in the sense that I’m honoured by it and I’m old enough, thank god, to appreciate it for what it is. I listen to what people have to say once they’ve read the book. There are two levels upon which this works. One is where people are relating to the life and the characters in the book as though they are real people, and to the life of the person – me - who wrote it. And they’re coming up and saying, “The life you’ve led and the way you’ve talked about it gives you a kind of guru status.” The others are people who got the philosophy of the book, who said, “This is, for me, an objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil.” That philosophy has resonated with them and they want to know more.

One of the ideas proposed by the book is that there are no good and evil individuals, merely good and evil acts. I was reminded of Hannah Arendt’s notion about the greater harm being done not by the perpetrators of evil, but those who witness it and allow it to happen.

She’s most famous for the phrase “the banality of evil.” I think that that has a certain amount of sense in it, but there are two problems with it. I’ve read everything by Hannah Arendt, and she never once found a way to define evil. And if you can’t present for better or worse a definition of evil that other people can come to grips with, a phrase like “the banality of evil” doesn’t mean anything. That phrase is typical of a lot of the philosophy of the 20th century in my view; it is the philosophy of appearance, the philosophy of phrases that look more clever than they actually are. The second thing is, if you’ve actually been chained to a wall and tortured, the last thing it is is banal.

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.

How integral was maintenance of the body to your survival?

In solitary for two years, in the punishment unit, the discipline I imposed on my self was harder than the discipline they imposed. I did ten years of karate and five years of boxing. I know that sounds contradictory and incongruous for someone who seems to have been so ridiculously undisciplined: heroin addiction, armed robbery, that’s pretty far to let it slip. But I don’t have any track marks anywhere on my arms because I always maintained discipline as to how and where I would use the needle and how many times I’d use it before I’d get another clean needle. Even doing the armed robberies there were things I wouldn’t do. I’d never put my hand on a person; I wouldn’t hurt anyone physically. I lived in a slum, I never got diseases or whatever; I kept myself scrupulously clean and maintained a sense of discipline about my personal hygiene. That sense of discipline helps you.

It’s funny that writers often get portrayed as decadent, flaky individuals rather than some guy digging a ditch with a pen.

It took me five years to write this book, it took me a year and a half to edit it. The first two drafts were destroyed. In that time, if you’re not dedicated to what you’re doing, you are gonna let it go. The amount of focus you need is the diametrical opposite of being flaky. And of course it took me a long time to realise that. I couldn’t write without a bottle of scotch and an ashtray and a packet of cigarettes, and by the time I finished a few pages work the bottle was half empty, the ashtray was half full, and that’s how I wrote. I don’t smoke now, I don’t drink and I don’t take drugs, and the work that’s coming from me is the best work I’ve ever done. And I’d never take any substance of any kind that might jeopardise the flow of work. There’s a coherence and an ability to focus, a clear-headedness that is directly connected to sobriety. But I did have that quasi-romantic view once. I spent my life as a writer preventing myself from being able to write. I was being published when I was at university, and I had every chance, everyone said you have a stellar career ahead of you as a writer and then I lost it all, threw it all away.

Did you ever give up on it for good?

Even when I was on the run I continued to write. I wrote a series of short stories when I was working for the Bombay mafia, and the series title was ‘My Blood Is Never Cold’. A young mafia gangster had become a friend of mine, he was a hit-man, and when we knew each other well enough for me to ask him, ‘What does it feel like to kill people in cold blood?’ and he said,‘My blood is never cold – only theirs.’ As soon as I heard it, a whole series of short stories spun out from that one phrase from him, so I wrote them, with apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, under the name Nick Carraway. I had published about six of the stories in the biggest selling newspaper, and I knew the editor, he knew my situation, and despite the fact that I was on the run he said, “I want to publish these stories, I really like them.” I was sitting in Leopold’s one night, my favourite dive in Bombay, and this guy came up and said, “Sorry to interrupt you, somebody told me you’re Nick Carraway; is it true?” And I said, “Yeah, it is.”And he said, “Oh my god, I love your stories, nobody’s writing like this. Do you mind? My friends are here, they’re big fans.” And about seventeen guys came over and crowded around me. And I went to the editor the next day and said, “I’ve gotta stop writing these stories. I’m on the run. It’s compromising my status as a fugitive. I can’t do this.”

That must’ve been incredibly frustrating.

So much potential was just wasted. I had a following, that whole potential, a career that, had I been a free man, would’ve begun from that day onwards, I could’ve spun that out into a writing career there and then, and it was nipped in the bud. Once I finally found myself in the physical environment of the prison, I decided that I was going to write a novel, that I was going to use the events of my own life, and that it would be the book I wanted to write and tried to write for 25 years and hadn’t been able to.

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.

This idea was also present in Bill Carter’s book about Sarajevo, ‘Fools Rush In’ – art as a mechanism of survival rather than the plaything of the western bourgeoisie. It also puts in context the destruction of your manuscript by the prison guards – twice – which also happened to Jean Genet.

My name for it is “articide”: the destruction of a man through the destruction of his art, and I’ve seen it done in prisons, systematic, calculated and very clever. For roughly ten millennia we have had the experience of locking up offenders. And those who’ve done it, the rules are very simple and the techniques are very few but very effective. Now this is brought into our consciousness on a daily level by what’s been happening to Iraqi prisoners, it’s on the front page of our newspapers and on our television screens, so it’s suddenly there in front of us, but this only at one end of the extreme end of the incarceration phenomenon, one end of a very nasty spectrum.

I recently bought and watched the DVD of John Hillcoat’s film ‘Ghosts . . . Of The Civil Dead.’ Have you seen it?

A number of my friends acted in it. There’s another film about incarceration called ‘Every Night, Every Night’ and that’s about the same punishment unit where we were routinely taken out of our cells and were beaten and tortured, so that’s worth a look as well, it’s a kind of companion piece to ‘Ghosts . . . Of The Civil Dead.’

One of the points in that film, and it’s also in ‘Shantaram’ to some degree, is that the notion of rehabilitation in the justice system seems like a fairytale.

Well, that’s true to a certain extent. I think rehabilitation is a more recognised component today than it was in the past. It was really nothing more than lip service; it was a token addition to juridical sentencing in the past. There was no notion, no reality of rehabilitation; it was only a token phrase that was applied to juridical sentencing as a fig leaf to try to cover the true and real nature, which is a retributive, vengeance-based system. The traditional components of juridical sentencing are, in order: sentencing of the offender, punishment, deterrence of other offenders, and then rehabilitation. Rehabilitation features far more prominently today in Australia, the United States and Britain than it did when I was sentenced in 1978, but it’s still not effective in the sense that the recidivism rate in Australia is 80%. Any ten men you look at, eight of those guys are going to come back to prison so it’s clearly not working. My own explanation for why it doesn’t work is that I don’t think the punishment, deterrence or rehabilitation of the offender back into the community make sense without forgiveness. We don’t have a mechanism by which we can say to an offender, “You know what? You fucked up. Badly. But you can earn our forgiveness. We will forgive you, but you’ve got to do this, this and this. And when you get out, you won’t just still be loathed, hated and excluded from the human family, you’ll be forgiven, you’ll be a fully franchised member of our community again, we’ll welcome you back. You mess up again, we’ll come down even harder on you next time.” As it is at the moment, we are the unforgiven. Men and women who emerge from prison have the sense that they are excluded from the human family, that they are devils in exile.

There’s a line in the book about prisons being the temple . . .
. . . where devils learn to pray.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.