Dorian: An Imitation

...but I'd rather be one of the few who finds pleasure in Self's perversity than one of the many who see only perveristy in such pleasures (as those of the wanton that is Self's Henry Wotton). Perhaps you should skip this tale if you: ) rarely find reinterpretations as enjoyable -- note that this is not the same as 'good' -- as an original or 'classic' ) are offended by repeated discussions of drugs, sex, homosexuality, precious bodily fluids, et cetera ) haven't read any of his other works; or have, and don't like such ) don't like it when authors make much wordplay or use obscure vocabulary which might require the reader to visit a dictionary Note: I am a big fan of Mr. Self. You also may find his writing very entertaining if you don't fall into any of the above buckets. If you're interested in checking for yourself, I would recommend the short story collection _Grey Area_ or the novel _Great Apes_. (The only major book of his that I did not find highly enjoyable was _How the Dead Live_, which was a little tedious.) So there you have my opinion. It's just that. But do take the reviews of those who panned this book as such as well. There's no accounting for taste; however, I personally recommend that you taste this account of a modern Dorian Gray. Terrible, I know;).

It was years ago that I read the Wilde classic, so I wasn't as I read Will Self's update consciously or otherwise thinking about the differences between the two and judging how it measures or fails to measure up to its more famous predecessor. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I enjoyed it while many others disliked it. As a standalone novel about narcissism - surely a contemporary social ill, if not the scourge of our age - I thought "Dorian" stood its own ground very well. Self doesn't pull his punches in his depiction of the dissolute lifestyle of the upper classes. He seethes with barely concealed contempt for their amorality and their never-ending drug and sex orgies. There's not one sympathetic character among the lot. They're careless and callous of life - they dismiss somebody else's death by murder with the wave of a limp wrist - so when they catch AIDS and find the dagger pointing at their own throats, should anybody baulk ? Dorian is only the distillate and the end result of a values system that encourages if not promotes self worship. Self's excessive wordplay - headache inducing as always - is only quintessentially Self. I'm sure he's added liberally to the English language. His graphic, no holds barred take on decadence is often unpleasant and shocking. His narrative technique is sometimes confusing as he takes us backwards and forwards in time, juxtaposing past events alongside current occurrences through the use of bedside confessions. We confront our horror just as the tale reaches its nadir when Dorian confuses himself with his airbrushed video images. The rest, as they say, is history. "Dorian" isn't for everyone. It's nasty, graphic and violent but also eerily contemporary and necessary.

Other reviewers' complaints about this novel typically focus on what is graphically unpleasant about Self's depictions of his characters. Well, wake up. It isn't 1959 anymore, when this complaint was raised about William Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch. Will Self has created an extraordinarily inventive, imaginative rewriting of Wilde's novel, set in the 1980s and '90s. Only a writer as talented as Will Self could have achieved this re-vision so successfully. The novel is filled with brilliant one-liners, and the plot and characters have also been brilliantly re-imagined. Anyone who is bored by the tiresome "cleverness" of contemporary gay American fiction, with its endless pseudo-dilemmas (how is the protagonist supposed to choose between the cute do-gooder and the devilishly handsome studster who keeps tempting him?) will be grateful to be able to read a novel in which plot, character, and style actually conspire together to create something truly thoughtful and lasting.

This novel is at best confusing but still intriguing. Most of the time you aren't quite sure what is happening, since the book has a tendency to jump around a bit. But what I had loved it for was that it had captured the decandency of the original. Also was quite surprised too that Lord Henry Wotton was a bigger villain in this piece than the original. I loved the surprise ending.

Judging by its title, I at first thought that Will Self had in mind the ambitious goal of writing a viable version of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" set in the age of AIDS and drugs, while at the same time daring the reader to compare his novel to the original. To set himself up for this inevitable comparison with a master like Wilde, he pulls the reader in from the very beginning with his spectacular stylistic prowess. Though quite faithful to the original, he soon transcends it and uses the Dorian Gray story as an instrument in an exploration of the uneven flow of time, and of the interplay between physical time, historical time and biological time.Youth, venerated almost religiously in our days, is of course defined in terms of biological time, and when the flow of biological time comes to a standstill in Dorian, some form of time keeps flowing on in the artistic rendering of Dorian, the painting in Wilde, the video installation in Self. This artistic rendering is the one that provides a picture of our age for future generations, and thus the time that flows in it is historical time. By contrast the lifestyle of the Wottons and their friends gives the appearance of historical time at a standstill, while biological time is flowing inexorably, driving many of these people to early deaths by disease (mainly AIDS) originating in this very lifestyle. Maybe Mr. Self's most original creation is Henry Wotton's neighbor, the "jiggling man" who metes out the seconds of physical time for Wotton's existence.Whether reading Wilde or Self, the picture/installation is an extremely clever, but also an extremely contrived device. Will Self deals with this problem by attaching a both shocking and very ingenious epilogue in which everything that has gone before is revealed to have been fiction written by Henry Wotton. This fiction in turn has an immense impact on Dorian Gray's "real" life and in the last ten pages or so the interplay between fiction and reality --- or more precisely between a fiction within a fiction and a reality within a fiction --- becomes the main focus. This is a very interesting and major issue in its own right, and this epilogue does not do it justice, nor could it. With all his ingenuity Will Self has overloaded the book. The same can be said also about his clever but excessive use of Wilde type epigrams. As an example, he has Wotton commenting on Baz' death with the following paraphrase of Lady Bracknell ("The The Importance of Being Earnest") "For Baz to have died once would have been unfortunate; for him to die twice looks like carelessness." I found this funny but also over the top.These problems aside, "Dorian" is a thought-provoking and extremely well-written novel well deserving the reader's attention.