| AN INTERVIEW WITH GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS by
Stephen Walker
( THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW )
As I mentioned as my studio guest this afternoon
is Gregory David Roberts and some of you may have heard of him over
the last little while. He has released his debut novel which has
been somewhat of a publishing sensation released on independent
publishing label a thousand pages. But a lot of the attention wasn’t
so much on the book but the background of the man behind the book.
In the 70s he became involved in heroin, became involved in stick
ups, hold ups, was apprehended for that. Was imprisoned, escaped
from prison and went to India which is where the book Shantaram
picks up the story and the book Shantaram focuses basically on Greg’s
Indian experience and indeed we hope there’s some more experiences
to come. He’s lived many lives in the one that he has lived.
SW - Welcome to the studio, Gregory.
GDR – Thank you, Stephen.
SW - What a long strange trip it’s been.
GDR – It was a wild and wicked ride, I just
wish there wasn’t so much to regret in it.
SW – I mentioned the fact that the couple
of interviews that I’ve seen, or sort of read with you, that
people tend to concentrate more perhaps on your real life than they
do the life in the book.
GDR – It’s something that I understand.
I think that there is a clear interest, especially in Australia,
it’s something that’s a little bit less marked in England.
I sold the book in London to Time Warner and in New York to St Martins
Picador, and in all of my communication with them, whether it’s
been through email, or phone, or letter, everything has focused
on the book and the writing in the book. In Australia, people focus
on the life and I can understand that because I am Australian and
the events that occurred did happen here in this country and so
there is a natural interest in it and I don’t feel unhappy
or uncomfortable talking about it.
SW – Right, so they’re not treating
you like Chopper Read with both ears intact, or anything.
GDR – No, they’ve been, I’ve
done a great many interviews now, I’ve done about sixty interviews
across the country with journalists in print, radio and TV and they
haven’t all begun the same way, but they’ve certainly
all ended the same way. I said at an address to the Melbourne Press
Club here, that the journalists I met in this country really left
me awed and humbled by the experience. They brought a sense of compassion
and sympathy that I hadn’t expected. I think I had a sort
of bigoted expectation really, about the journalists in Australia,
but they hadn’t brought that to me they were compassionate,
they were sympathetic, and they brought an open mind and an open
heart to the book and to me as a person and engaged with me as a
human being and not just as you know, a record sheet, something
that’s written on a piece of paper.
SW – The book took you thirteen years, when
did you decide that writing a book was going to be what you were
going to do, that you were going to actually record your experiences.
Well, the book is based upon your experience and I guess the tendency
is for people to read it as biography. Would it be giving the game
away to ask if everything that is in the book, actually happened
even if it just might be elaborated, or it might be modified for
the sake of the novel. What proportion actually happened and what
proportion didn’t or would that be giving the game away?
GDR – No, not at all and I think it’s
a fair question. It’s a novel based on my life. I was a writer
all my life, I’ve been writing since I was a child I wrote
my first play when I was five years old. And I wrote all my life.
My first instinct is always to write. I think that there are two
kinds of writers in this world – those who choose to write
and those who have no choice but to write. And I’m that second
kind of writer. When I was chained to a wall the second time in
India and tortured, I knew that my life was in the balance and I
thought that I might die, the one part of me, the one voice in my
head was saying damn, this is just great material, and if I live,
I’ve got to have this. So while I was almost drowning in my
own blood, and my body had been cut open with wounds and cuts from
head to toe, I was writing the experience then, I’m that kind
of writer, I always write. It wasn’t until I had the freedom
to actually devote my talents, such as they are, to a major piece
of work, that I looked at the events of my own life and thought
they’re compelling enough to actually sit down and write about
this and talk about it. So I always had that artistic writers view
of things and the novel for me was a natural turn because I see
the novel as the most profound and beautiful way to talk about the
human condition. I admire music, art, my brother’s a composer
and songwriter here and a man of genius and talent, I love and admire
his work. And I know painters and dancers and singers and sculptors
and so on and I love their work and admire it, but I can’t
do any of those. The way I play the guitar was described by the
children in a village in India as in the Hindi phrase, loosely translated,
“killing the chicken”, and so my only way of writing,
of expressing myself as an artist is through my writing work. So
I looked at the novel form and said this is what I’m going
to do. I’ll create a narrative structure, and then I’ll
take the events of my life and put them into that and provide something
I hope which has, which reads like fiction but feels like fact,
which has the authenticity of a life that’s really been lived,
and yet has the page turning feel and speed of a novel.
SW – Well the events in the book took place
in the 80s, so was this an exercise in memory or had you written
certain things down in the course of this.? You were saying you’d
been a constant writer, the experience while you were in India were
you progressively annotating this, or did it end up when you sat
down to write this novel that the brain had to flex and stretch
to remember these particular events in the sequence they occurred
in.
GDR – I like the phrase there was a lot
of flexing and stretching going on. The fact is that I wrote all
throughout those years I had a series of short stories published
in Australia, sorry in Bombay, under the heading “My Blood
Is Never Cold”. They became so popular that I had to stop
writing them because they were compromising my status as a fugitive.
I was starting to develop a little bit a kind of celebrity status
in India and I was continually writing but I lost all of that material.
When you live on the run, you sometimes have to get out of a window
as the police are coming in the front door which happened to me
twice in Europe, where I lost all of my writing work. The first
time I lost a novel, the second time I lost a collection of short
stories that I’d managed to grab on that first escape. So,
I’d written things down continually, which was one way in
fact of making sure that I could recall them later on. But I’d
lost all that work along the way, so it was a question of flexing
and stretching, and forcing the memory to travel back into the past
to write these things. But some of the people, some of the characters
I carry them with me every single day. A character like Pravaker
in my book, some characters are composite characters where you’ll
put the various characteristics of different people together and
make one composite. But Pravaker is a character, I loved him so
much and my respect for him and my love for him is such that an
admiration for him as a human being that I felt I had to, in the
sense, in terms of my duty to him, I had to render him as faithfully
and honestly as I could, as completely as I could.
SW – Well, when you turned up in India of
course, you didn’t have the Lonely Planet Guide in one hand,
you know, all those tips and things, you certainly were in the underbelly
of the Indian experience, which is very under, in terms of the black
market in terms of Bollywood, and then eventually with theMujahadeen
in Afghanistan when they were fighting the Russians, so all those
events actually did occur in that kind of sequence, but there’s
a little bit of elaboration as far as the, as you said the composites
or perhaps moving conversations around within that framework.
GDR – Well, the events were actually, not
so much sequential all of the substantive events that happened to
the character Lin as my name was in Bombay, people knew me under
the name Lin and Lin Baba and all of the events that happened to
Lin Baba in the book, happened to me, but I re-chronolgised some
of them in order to fit within that narrative structure. And so
I stretched them and pushed them and pulled them to make them fit
within a story that could give people a sense of a beginning, a
middle and an end, which life doesn’t have. You know, life
has one big bang at the beginning and it has either a big bang or
a big whimper at the end. And there are many beginnings and middles
throughout the life, but for me as an artist I wanted to provide
readers with a sense of a beginning and a middle and an end, which
would leave them feeling, I hope, nourished at the end of it. And
so I provided in that a re-chronologising of events, I took some
of those events, which are all real events, and changed them around
in time so they fitted within that storyline.
SW – So, does that include the number of
quite brutal beatings that you sort of undergo in the course of
the book? Quite a remarkable amount of physical pain and physical
sort of assault that you’ve had to deal with in your life.
GDR – Yeah, there’s more to come in
the sequel. I left, you know there are a number of things that I
didn’t want to put everything into one book and the fact is,
it’s very strange the life that I lead was so kind of wild
and extreme, you know, you’re acting in Bollywood films one
day and living in a palace the next. You’re living in a slum
and going, travelling from being a slum doctor running a clinic
in a slum hut and living there with twenty five thousand people,
to living in a five star hotel and having an unlimited expense account
because you’re working for the Bombay Mafia. And a life of
such extremes can have, can stretch credibility and have people
thinking what the hell but strangely enough the actual events were
more extreme than the events that I’ve actually put into the
book and there’s more to come in the sequel.
SW – Well that’s what I’d heard,
that this is the second book of a trilogy Is that correct?
GDR – Yeah, there will be at least three
books in this series and this one is the second of the series. I
didn’t write the first one because even though I was being
offered money to do it, I didn’t want to write about the armed
robberies that I’d committed. Twenty six years has gone past,
but I still didn’t want to bring the people I’d robbed
through that experience again. I thought I have to let more time
go past and let this book get out there, this book which is based
around Bombay, before I can deal with that subject matter. So that’s
why I chose the second book in the series.
SW – Now the book that we do get is quite
a weighty tome, a thousand pages, a very fine print, quite a large
book just physically. Is that edited down from an even larger book
? I imagine there was so much material. How big was the book when
you first went to the publishers and said, are you interested in
this?
GDR – Oh, the publishers committed themselves
to it on the strength of four chapters. They knew the story and
of my life, and they read four chapters and they committed themselves
to it and gave me an advance, and I committed myself to them to
provide three books in the series. So they had that before and they
knew that it was a, they expected it to be they knew it was long,
they expected it to be about eight hundred pages, well it turned
out to be closer to a thousand pages. But the book as it is, is
a mere shadow of its former self. It was around half a million words
and it’s been trimmed down.
SW – And this is in long hand, I believe
you write.
GDR – Yes, I write long hand as a writer
on, I write in journals, I write on the right hand side of the page
and leave the left hand blank, and that, as I’m writing, as
I make editorial changes, corrections and so on, I’ll scratch
those down on the left hand side of the journal and sometimes you’ll
read, there’ll be several pages of a journal where there’s
nothing on the left hand side, and in other pages there are more
entries on the left and changes being made than there are on the
right. So, I write long hand then commit it to the computer and
take in that process go through about twenty four, twenty five edits.
SW – Now the book is on an independent label,
if you like, taking the analogy of music, Scribe, the Rosenblooms
who designed it and published it and put it out. I guess it was
a pretty big thing for that small company to do, such a large book
and what it’s about and all that sort of stuff. Had you tried
to take it to more established and larger publishing houses before
the Rosenblooms?
GDR – Yes, I’d had approaches made
to me from larger publishing houses and they were too intrusive
in their attitude; they wanted to tell me how to write the book
and they wanted to tell me how long it should be. When I made contact
with Henry and Margot Rosenbloom, who own Scribe, and I’ve
said a number of times I think that if Henry’s the heart of
Scribe Publications, which he undoubtedly is, Margot is the soul
of the company. And they had a meeting with me after reading four
chapters and they committed themselves to the project. They liked
the work, they liked the story and they thought that I was capable
of writing it and telling that story. And I was very, very pleased
to be associated with Scribe, because Scribe is a publishing house
of great integrity. They, I’m on the same shelf with people
like Noam Chomsky, Helen Caldicott, Sharon Beader, Alison Bernovsky
and so on. This is a publishing house of prestige and integrity
which has established a marvellous reputation in the industry here
so I was very pleased to be with them and it was kind of a mutual
risk – they were taking a risk with me because I was completely
unknown and they were giving me a large advance and not sure whether
I could complete the project but hoping that I would. And I was
taking a risk with them because they’re a small publishing
house and didn’t have the distribution arm that some of the
larger publishing houses had. As fate would have it, Henry attached
himself through Scribe to Pan McMillan and their distribution arm
and I can only tell you that my experience with Pan Mac has been
absolutely fantastic. They’ve engaged with this book and helped
me to bring it to a huge audience across Australia. And it’s
in a way that is not organisational, they’ve responded as
a family of people in a marvellous, sympathetic, humane way. It’s
been enjoyable from beginning to end. So it’s been an association
that’s benefited everyone, but yes it did involve risk at
the beginning.
SW – Right. Quarter past five in Melbourne,
Gregory David Roberts is my studio guest, author of Shantaram and
liverer, as I’ve said, of a number of lives and incarnations,
probably more to come. I guess people would be curious though, the
post Indian experience, that isn’t covered in the book, but
we talked a lot about, or talked a bit about what lead to the book,
and your escape from Australia and being on Interpol’s list
globally. And you were ten years on the run so to speak overseas,
weren’t you? What happened after the India just perhaps a
little quick précis, because I’m certainly very curious
to know how the man sitting opposite me came out of India and what
happened to him after that. Without giving away particular plot
lines of any book to come, after you left India you went to Europe
I believe.
GDR – Well I went to Europe a number of
times from India. I travelled the world as a smuggler, working for
my mafia boss in Bombay. I was smuggling passports into Africa,
the two biggest passport distribution centres in the world at the
time were in Lagos in Nigeria and Kinshasa in Zaire which at that
time the country was called Zaire then, it’s now called the
Democratic Republic of Congo. And then Zaire was run by the conspicuously
insane dictator Mambuto and the military generals who ran Nigeria
accepted bribes to allow the passport trade to go on and Mambuto
in Zaire accepted bribes to allow passports to be transferred. And
so people travelled from all over Africa to buy and sell passports
in those two centres and I smuggled them from Bombay and back. And
went on other missions around the world, and went into Europe a
number of times and lived in Germany for a short time, learned to
speak German. Then after ten years of being on the run, I was on
a mission from Bombay to Zurich, the plane touched down in Frankfurt
to refuel and I was recaptured. The passport I was using had been
compromised and so I then went into a prison called Fraugisheim
in Germany where I fought the extradition for nineteen months. That
was a prison which housed all of the terrorists of Europe, the PLO,
the PFLP, the Baader Meinhof, the Rutter Amir Fraction, RAF, Hezbollah
and others. And after spending nineteen months with them, fighting
extradition and winning a number of concessions, I was returned
to Australia, spent two months, two years rather, in the solitary
unit in H division and then four more years in the mainstream and
completed my sentence of ten years to the day.
SW – And since then, well a lot of people
say writing is a very solitary life, it requires a lot of discipline,
and a lot of time you’ve got to be prepared to, well, close
the door and get down to the craft. How many hours do you tend to
sort of work on your writing each week these days? Like, what is
your sort of rhythm if you like?
GDR – In the best of all possible worlds,
I would write eight hours a day, seven days a week when I’m
working on a project. And that might be for the duration of the
project, to two years perhaps to three, to complete a major work.
The problem is that you can’t always do that - life gets in
the way of art and so that time will be stretched out, particularly
if you have to work in order to pay the rent and put food on the
table. You can’t get there to do your eight hours a day and
so on. But in the best of all possible worlds, that’s what
I would do. My best writing time, I like to come in, I have a small
office in the city which I took, it’s a very small cubby hole
of a place in Melbourne. I like to be in the centre of the city
in order to write, surrounded by people and noise and activity.
I like to have music when I’m writing, and I turn the music
up as loud as I possibly can and get, use the music to help me.
One of my favourite images is of Flaubert writing Madame Bovary,
sitting at the piano and writing with one hand and banging out the
rhythms of the sentences with the other on the keyboard. And I love
this image, it’s so true for me; I use music in, to establish
the rhythms in my writing constantly and change the music as it
suits the change of mood and the change of rhythm. So in the best
of all possible worlds I’d get in there by about ten or eleven
in the morning, and stay ‘til about ten or eleven at night,
and in that time get eight good hours of writing with a couple of
other hours for exercise and food and whatever is required.
SW – With that sort of regime, what’s
the future of the next book, or is it already finished in actual
fact?
GDR – Oh no, I’m fifty thousand words
into the sequel, which is really a toe park into a book of a, it
will be three hundred and fifty thousand words this book, the next
one.
SW – What was Shantaram?
GDR – Three hundred and eight five thousand,
so I’m trying to slim down just a little in order to please
my publisher. So I project it to be about that size and fifty thousand
words into it, I’m hopeful that because some funds have come
in, I sold the book at auction in London and sold it in New York,
now money hasn’t come in from that yet – the wheels
of publishing grinding somehow more slowly than the wheels of justice
as the reality is. But, there ought to be, God willing, there’ll
be enough money there to focus on the writing and not to have to
constantly work throughout that, which slowed the whole process
up by some years. It took me five years to write Shantaram and a
year and a half to edit it, and that six and a half year commitment
was not just for me of course, as with any artist, it’s the
commitment from your family, from your partner, from children and
from your mum and your dad and your friends and others. And it’s
six and a half years during which you can’t participate in
the community of people around you to the extent that you’d
like. You can’t involve yourself in social causes, and various
other things, there are things you just can’t do, which I’m
now doing, I’m accepting speaking engagements and so forth
for the first time in six and a half years because I’m promoting
this book and I have enough time to do it. So, I’m hoping
that I can trim that process down and have this next book finished
within two years.
SW – Must be quite a contrast in the experience
of doing what you’re doing now where it’s a very public
exposure to that very private internal world that you sort of day
to day week to week live when you’re writing. How do you reconcile
those two, do you find you’re a little bit of a chameleon
in that regard, able to adapt easily, or is there a little bit of
disjunction when you’re changing from one role to the other,
in that sort of way?
GDR – I think this is one of the reasons
why I love to write in the heart of a city. It’s not just
that I’m a city guy and loves cities, it’s that, and
I love this city, I love most of the cities I’ve ever been
in and lived in my life. A great part of my heart is still in Bombay,
for instance, and living there in the streets. But writing in a
city and living in a city as opposed to separating yourself, I know
many, many writers who like to write, like their isolation to be
a physical isolation as well as that ideological or intellectual
isolation, they like to put themselves in a beach scenario or in
the mountains or whatever. And I think that would help to have a
sense of dislocation when you go on the road and promote the book,
but if you write in the city, you get on the tram every day, you’re
travelling with people going in, you’ve got life and activity
going on around you in the city, you catch the tram home, you’re
interacting with people on a daily basis and you don’t have
that sense of isolation from the human species, from your fellow
human beings. So, there is a sense in which I was always part of
the community. The other part is I think that there are two kinds
of writers when it comes to promoting books. I’ve read for
a number of years now reviews and things of writers who are promoting
their books and who loathe the publicity process and who drag themselves
through publicity tours and I always think, what the hell is going
on with these guys, what’s the matter with them? Because,
for me it’s an enormous privilege and opportunity; it’s
a great honour to be able to get out there and talk. So I think
you either have something to say or you don’t. And if you
have something to say, then any opportunity to say it is a welcome
one.
SW – So, when you anticipate a similar ritual
that you’re going through now will occur with the next book
in our mind’s eye, how long down the track will it be before
you’re doing this again for the next book?
GDR – I would hope that it’s within
two years; I’d like to have the next book finished within
two years because I have a number of writing projects. There are,
I see four books in this series, I’m committed to write two
more, but I see four in the series, I have three other books as
spin offs from this that are already drawn out in schema and ready
to go. I finished a book of poetry last year which will be published
at the end of next year, I have a book of philosophy which will
come out at the end of next year which outlines my cosmological
model in answer to the three big questions – where did we
come from, why are we here and where are we going. I have an involvement
with writing a libretto for an opera which is a project that I’d
take on with a great deal of passion, I’m very, very keen
to do it. And there are a number of others and I, my life was so
hard; I’ve been blown up, stabbed, beaten, tortured, tortured
on two continents for God’s sake, and I’ve had malaria,
I’ve gone down to half my body weight twice. My longevity
is not as high, my life expectancy isn’t as high as it otherwise
might be and I have a lot of work that I want to do. I also have
a social agenda. I want to go back to Bombay and establish a mobile
clinic, I want to pay for it myself from the proceeds from writing
this book and publicising it. Establish a mobile clinic that can
park outside the slum, and do the kind of work that I used to do
but in a much more formal and organised way; treat the slum dwellers
with diagnostic first aid medicine. And so that itself will keep
me very busy and so on, so I’m hopeful that I can, if you
like, churn the books out one every two years.
SW – It’s twenty five past five, believe
it or not, we’ve been talking for twenty five minutes and
I could just talk to you for hours, having read the book over my
holiday period, as I said to you, a hundred pages a day over ten
days, I found it a very, I used to look forward to it each morning
after the coffee, once I was sort of moderately mentally coherent.
It was excellent. I was curious if any of the people that figure
in the book, have actually received the book or have read the book,
or given you any feedback about the book? Do you know if any of
the people over in India have you sent them copies or have they
given you any feedback at all?
GDR – Only two people who feature in this
book, I haven’t been back to India so, and I have to go back
in, at the very latest I have to go back in May next year, because
the international editions of the book come out in London, New York,
and in Bombay in Mumbai next year in May and so at the very latest
I have to go back then but I would like to go back before that of
course. And I have to go to London in January to meet the other
publishers. Now, two people to my knowledge, only two, maybe more
but only two have actually had the book put in their hands and read
it. And their reactions have been very emotional and very strong.
I mean, they were saying that on the one hand they’re flattered
to be included in the book, and delighted to some extent, but they’re
also, I think intellectually and philosophically involved with it
and engaged with it. I’m glad to say they liked it. I don’t
want to sound too self-aggrandising, but they liked the book a lot
and to me it was very gratifying, I was very pleased. The huge test,
there are two tests, one is do readers like it and the other is
if you’re writing from life, do the people you’re talking
about like it because it’s about them and they did like the
book so, that was the important thing.
SW – Shantaram is the book, it’s available
again in the shops, I believe it sold out its first printing. Initial
copies came with the CD that we’ve been hearing under our
interview today as a little bit of a bonus and I guess fitting in
very much with your use of music when you’re writing. Are
they still going to be available or has that been and gone?
GDR – No, we’re doing another pressing.
SW – Of the CD as well?
GDR – It proved to be very popular. I brought
it out in order to help the independent bookstores to get the book
over the line. The chain stores can mark a book down to half its
price and still make a profit but the independent bookstores can’t
do that. And I think if we don’t have independent bookstores
in this country, we’ll only have about twenty writers in Australia,
so I see it as an important thing to promote them.
SW – Okay, there you go then, the CD that
you’ve been hearing under us, you can pick up as a bit of
a bonus if you like with Shantaram the book. The author, Gregory
David Roberts has been in the studio. It’s been a pleasure
to meet you, for real. I sort of feel like I met you through the
text actually, so it was interesting when you came into the studio,
comparing my mental construct of what you may or may not be like
and what you’ve turned out to be. It’s been very interesting
and no doubt people will see you perhaps popping up by evidence
of the film crew that’s with Gregory in the studio today,
on the ABC fairly soon, I think on the George Negus program, it
looks like something’s going to be happening. You might even
get a glimpse of the Triple R studios, who knows. But certainly
thanks for your time.
GDR – Thank you very much, Stephen.
SW – Best of luck, and after having read
the book, I have to end our interview with just a couple of words
– look after yourself.
GDR – (Laughs) God bless you, thank you.
back to top
|
