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The Mountain Shadow, by Gregory David Roberts
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Shantaram introduced millions of readers to a cast of unforgettable characters through Lin, an Australian fugitive, working as a passport forger for a branch of the Bombay mafia. In The Mountain Shadow, the long-awaited sequel, Lin must find his way in a Bombay run by a different generation of mafia dons, playing by a different set of rules.It has been two years since the events in Shantaram, and since Lin lost two people he had come to love: his father figure, Khaderbhai, and his soul mate, Karla, married to a handsome Indian media tycoon. Lin returns from a smuggling trip to a city that seems to have changed too much, too soon. Many of his old friends are long gone, the new mafia leadership has become entangled in increasingly violent and dangerous intrigues, and a fabled holy man challenges everything that Lin thought he’d learned about love and life. But Lin can’t leave the Island City: Karla, and a fatal promise, won’t let him go.
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Product details
Paperback: 880 pages
Publisher: Grove Press; Reprint edition (September 13, 2016)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802125557
ISBN-13: 978-0802125552
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 1.8 x 8.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
555 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#32,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Like many others, I loved Shantaram: A Novel, and so I approached this sequel with an equal mix of anticipation and trepidation. Could Gregory David Roberts repeat the magic? The short answer is no. This book isn't nearly as good as Shantaram, and worse, it has the potential to make Shantaram seem worse in retrospect. But having said that, it's not a total disaster either. I read it in a week, and despite its near 900 page length, I never lost interest nor found it hard to stay with.The Mountain Shadow is set two years after the events of Shantaram. Lin is still living in Bombay and working as a forger for his mentor Khaderbhai's mafia organisation, now run by Sanjay Kumar and known as the Sanjay Corporation. He is living with his girlfriend Lisa (I didn't remember her, but she was in the previous book towards the end), and while he still carries a torch for Karla, he hasn't seen her for two years, since she married Ranjit, an aspiring politician.In the first 100 pages three key events happen. Lin meets an Irishman by the name of Concannon, he is kidnapped by a rival gang who want information about the Sanjay Corporation and his girlfriend Lisa tells him that she wants to see other people. These three things will set a train of events in motion that drive the remainder of the plot. Apart from brief forays to Sri Lanka and to a spiritual retreat, the action is set entirely in Bombay and many familiar characters will appear, among them Didier, Abdullah, Madame Zhou and Karla. As in the previous book, Bombay is itself a key character in the book, with all its corruption and chaos, millionaires, gangsters, holy men and slum dwellers.This book is overwritten. It's full of flowery sentences like: "She was a river, not a stone, and every day was another curve in tomorrow's plain" or "Night is Truth wearing a purple dress, and people dance differently there". If it wasn't for the author's postscript telling us that he doesn't endorse drug taking, I would have sworn that he was stoned throughout the writing of this book. So many sentences read like the kind of thing you think is brilliant when you come up with them at 3am, but realise in the cold light of day that they are tripe. Where was the editor in this process, I wondered?The characters all spend huge amounts of time smoking marijuana and exchanging dialogue that feels like it belongs in a fortune cookie, eg: "A heart filled with greed, pride or hateful feelings is not free" or "It's the things that make us one, that make us worth having" or "Money's a river: some of us go with the current and some of us paddle to the shore". It's these empty platitudes that take the place of character development. I've now read 1700 pages of Lin's adventures and I still couldn't really tell you what Karla is like. Too many characters can be summarised in pithy descriptors like "angry lesbian", "spoiled heiress", "free-spirited Aquarian" or "foul-tempered crusader" - they aren't real or rounded people.And yet, for all these flaws, there's something likeable in these pages. I can't say with hand on heart that "you should read this", but it's not a write off either and it ends on a genuinely touching and uplifting note.
I'll start this review off with an observation. Female writers know how to write male characters well; but I've rarely met a male writer who can successfully write a good female character. I'm a man, by the way. Just thought I'd say it before the outraged begin to swarm.The book was well-written, and I waited for it a long time. But it simply wasn't as good as the first book, which would have been a tough act to follow in any event. I'll echo the others here in saying that the philosophy seemed hackneyed and cliche rather than profound. And he didn't treat the philosophy with his former seriousness and sublimity. Instead he mocked the philosophy and the very name 'Shantaram' in ways that felt like he was parodying his original. All good complaints, but that's not even my main issue.The characters in this book were a complete and utter shambles, which returns to my observation that men rarely write realistic female characters. Karla is the Ultimate Goddess Heroine of this novel; and no one really seems to challenge her status as the Ultimate Goddess Heroine, even the people like Kavita and Madame Zhou who hate her guts. The Karla of the first book was deeply flawed; she seemed like a real person to me because she was flawed, unstable, and more than a little crazy, but it didn't negate Lin's attraction to her. This installment's version of Karla not only was treated like a Goddess Heroine, but was even referred to as a "goddess" by Lin and others, or as "The Woman" as if she were the pinnacle of womankind. Her complexity as a character just vanished; even when her actions seemed illogical or selfish, she was revealed to have secretly been acting altruistically, and behaving in a way that seemed to conform more to the author's fantasies of "tough" women than real life. For instance, while lugging a dead body, Karla quips cheerily that she is on the "best date ever". In another scene, Karla and "Blue Hijab", a Muslim communist female assassin, convivially exchange curare-laced stun darts. They're just Manic Pixie Dream Girls with weapons.This brings me to the second part of my critique; there were so many new characters, and new "companies", particularly among the underworld characters, that it was hard to keep track of them all in my head and it didn't seem to make much difference whether I kept track of them or not. Farzad, Blue Hijab, the Sanjay Company, the Cycle Killers...why do this? Why make it confusing? Where was it going?Meanwhile, old characters that I did love seemed to change beyond recognition. Lisa, the sweet American girl who seemed to have beaten her demons, descends once again into drugs and sleaze. Vikram, the whimsical Indian cowboy, also develops a habit after the loss of Lettie, which didn't seem to fit his character. If the old Vikram was sad, he'd have done a kind deed for someone, or come up with a funny prank, or helped someone out with their own romance, not bought drugs. Kavita, the emancipated journalist, becomes just another angry lesbian. Certain elements of the story had a Bollywood feel; the street hustlers Scorpio and Gemini George coming into millions of dollars, for example, or the entire storyline of "Diva", the spoiled only-child heiress who loses her entire family, must hide in a slum, and then uses her wealth and newly acquired conscience to help the virtuous slum-dwellers. But I'll excuse the Bollywood elements; I'm a Bollywood fan myself, and after all, we're in Bombay here.Old characters changed in ways that I did not like, and I could scarcely be bothered to care about the new ones or their romances. What's with the revved-up emphasis on sex and romance in this book, anyway? It didn't seem to advance the plot in any meaningful way, it was just like, "Hey, here's some sex!"The one character who did not seem to change was one of my favorites, Mr. Didier Levy, the gay French-Jewish bon vivant. Chapeau to Didier; there were some great scenes involving him, his romantic advice or gossip, and his friends' willingness to defend him. And he remained as witty and elegantly dressed as ever. But even here, I feel I have to make a complaint. While nearly everyone else in the damn novel is getting laid, coupled up, partnered or married, poor old Didier gets nothing! He splits up with an old boyfriend in the first half of the novel, and has a romance with a handsome sculptor in the second half, but the sculptor leaves him, so that Didier is pretty much left alone. Moreover, we are merely told about these romances rather than shown them, and these romances are not a major part of the story. Is Roberts just squeamish to engage with gay love, or is he actually trying to portray gay life as an unprincipled free-for-all? Either way, I'm not impressed. At least in the first book, Vikram tells Lin that Didier should find a long-term partner and have that be one of his goals. No evidence of that in this installment!The final infuriating touch is that everyone basically gets to live happily ever after on Karla's money. This is perfectly insipid and very unrealistic. Lin, Karla and the whole shady cast of shady characters is suddenly going to go legit? Yeah right. I can't even imagine Lin and Karla being happy with a normal, boring life in a normal, boring house, let alone the rest of their friends. But they do, they all go legit with her help, and tearfully thank her for it. This thus enthrones her unimpeachable standard as the Ultimate Goddess Heroine. Barf.Bottom line: if you loved the first book, this one is still worth a read, for its Bombay scenes, its diverse social settings, and the grand sweep of Mr. Roberts' style. It's still overall a good book. But he's a lot more heavy-handed with that style now, so that instead of reading like a Great Novel, it reads like a cumbersome attempt at one. Consider yourself duly warned.
This book is terrible. Nearly 1,000 pages of almost nothing but rambling faux philosophy. Shantaram is one of my favorite books I have ever read, and this is probably my least favorite. The only reason I suffered through the whole thing was because I loved Shantaram so much, and I kept hoping this one would pick up. I read all of Shantaram in a couple of days because I could not unglue myself from it. It took me about a month to read The Mountain Shadow. It felt like a chore I had to do every day and it was difficult to ever get through more than 30 or 40 pages at a time. There is no real interesting plot or story, just a series of perfectly timed coincidences that happen so that Lin can spout absurd sentences along the lines of "Love is what Fate leaves when Faith is lost". That is just something I made up off the top of my head, but you can open the book to pretty much any page and find a line that is pretty close. The rest is just babbling about how great Karla is. I can't even recommend Shantaram in good conscious anymore out of fear that the person would love it enough to insist on reading this. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. It seems impossible that the same person wrote these two books. I am sure GDR got a nice payday out of this, and I can't be mad at that, but I selfishly wish he had just hung it up after the one novel. I will definitely not bother to pick up anything else he writes in the future.
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