We never learn the narrator’s actual name; which is not to say the narrator is unnamed. In fact, he has many names and many identities. The narrator’s “good name” as that term is used under the local parlance, is Lindsay, but that came from a counterfeit passport. The Indian locals call him “Linbaba,” or “Mr. Penis.” He will acquire other names in the course of the novel, including the title of the novel itself, which means “man of God’s Peace.”
The narrator’s s real name might be the author’s, for the book’s jacket touts many similarities between the fictional narrator and Gregory David Roberts. Both author and his fictionalized alter ego were driven by despair over a bitter divorce and child custody award to seek solace in heroin addiction, which led to crime, prison, escape, and then flight to a slum in India.
Even though almost all fiction contains varying degrees of autobiography, and vice versa, a close identification between author and fictitious character carries many risks. One can’t help but snicker at the photos of Ian Fleming, gun in hand, on the James Bond book covers, or Mickey Spillane naming his tough-guy hero after himself. Falsified autobiography is a class of literary pariah unto itself, for anger follows the discovery that one has been successfully fooled, notwithstanding the way that achieving the same end is lauded as a virtue in a work explicitly labeled as fiction. Perhaps with the aim of avoiding the kind of scrutiny and controversy that befell Henri Charrière, the author of Papillion, another highly embellished, ostensibly autobiographical work about prison and escape, the author of Shantaram delivers an exculpatory disclaimer—this is fiction. But there an implicit disclaimer to disclaimer. It is kind of a con job, but it is a brilliant con job.
Roberts grabs his reader by the labels, and demands attention with his superb opening paragraph, a near perfect fusion of narrative hook, character arc, and thematic summation:
