Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10354 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-26
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
It is 1981 and the "Royal Broodmare", as Henry Wotton calls her, is about to be married. Wotton, a homosexual, and his friend Baz have found a remarkable young man Dorian Gray, the epitome of male beauty. Sixteen years later, how does Dorian remain so youthful?

Customer Reviews

Odd, Interesting and Enjoyable
This is an updated version of 'Picture Of Dorian Grey' by Oscar Wilde, so in order to have any appreciation of this version, it helps to read the Oscar Wilde version first. The story, which begins in the early 1980's, concerns a beautiful young man named Dorian who takes to a lifestyle of unbridled hedonism with wanton abandon.

It's startling just how accurately Will Self has stuck to the original story, but at the same time giving it a modern twist.

What I found particularly enjoyable about this novel was Will Self's utterly odd and unique way of describing things. The prose here is like nothing I have ever read before, provoking seriously weird and wonderful mental imagery, frequently imbued with black humour. Self's vocabulary is immense and his humour is sharp. I feel particularly inclined to mention 'The Jiggling Man', a man who one of the central characters can see jiggling back and forth from one of the windows in his house. The sheer oddness and surrealism of this brought a smile to my face. Self must certainly view things with an unconventional eye, and that has allowed him to write some extremely distinctive prose.

The Dorian story also transfers well onto a modern landscape, with Self expertly weaving the AIDS epidemic, the life of Princess Diana and the 80's drug culture into Oscar Wilde's original story.

The story of Dorian, a neurotically vain and hedonistic young man, has particular relevance in the twenty-first century, since this book has a lot to say about the nature of vanity, decadence and promiscuity, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

I found this to be a superbly well-written, witty, satirical, and imaginative read, containing some truly distinctive prose and imagery.

Intoxicating and decadent
About a year ago, my brother put this book into my hands with the words, "Read this." Being both a life-long Wilde fan and an admirer, with some reservations, of the Self-Amis axis in modern British writing, I didn't require much persuasion.

The first pages, densely and descriptively evocative of the filthy decadence that fills the life of Henry Wotton, are a virtuoso exercise in the manipulation and control of words. I'm a heavy reader, and a bit jaded these days. The last time I remember a book having such a sudden visceral impact was American Psycho. Self burns away complacency with his searing verbiage.

Martin Amis and Will Self are both capable of producing prose that is stark and clean, and yet loaded with acid wit. Their language can be as colourful as the chat in a roomful of sailors. Unfortunately, both also tend to slip into displays of literary self-indulgence.

In Dorian, this tendency is muted. Self's vocabulary and talent seem to have been reined in by the primary text he is re-imagining, and the result is a wonderful kinaesthetic melange of words, a structure within which every component is always entirely aware of it's relationship to the whole, and a sensual delight.

I'm only now considering the discipline that must have been required to create this book. It reads easily, but must be the result of thousands of hours of attention and devotion. I can imagine Self at his desk, with his copy of Dorian Gray, staring and starting as the elements of his source material are transfigured and woven into the thread of a novel that is both utterly true to, and utterly unimaginaginable by, Wilde's original.

The story meanders through the world of the late 20th century, populated by a cast of freaks and outsiders, some of whom seek meaning and salvation, some transient distraction, while some merely drift through their own lives like shadows. Flitting incessantly between them all is Dorian, a glorious, hyper-real and achingly beautiful monster with a depraved and rotten core that gives the lie to his cherubic exterior.

The novel is able to explicitly state the suggestions of homosexuality and vice merely hinted at by Wilde. Self takes us on an unsettling car-crash history of gay culture, clearly relishing the task, through underground clubs reeking with stale dissapation and the acrid tang of danger, to English country-house parties where government ministers mingle with the junkies and dealers, and dinner is followed by speed-balls mainlined at the table.

I don't want to say too much about the story itself. THose who are familiar with Wilde's original will know the frame of the story and it's aesthetic conceit, where the portrait made by Basil Hallward of Dorian Gray bears the brunt of his dissolute life, while he remains forever pure and unchanged. Suffice to say that Self retains the basic elements of Wilde's story, and explodes it into a dystopic morality tale that functions as both corruscating parable and valedictory and funeral oration on the possibility of individual freedom from consequence.

You won't read many novels as good as this in your lifetime. There simply aren't that many out there.

dark modern sequel to wilde's ideas
you dont need to have read wilde or dorian to enjoy self's take on debauchery n full on murderous hedonism, at times i struggled with over-verbosity but let's face it self is seriously erudite and switched on and uses a vast vocab - how i wish i'd had the same tuition- that said though this is a top read throughout, there is palpable suspense with every turn of the page, for the heteros amongst us there is an insight into extreme homosexuality which is illuminating, but above all that this is just a great mind expanding read and i cannot recommend it enough, when the dust settles self will go down as a master craftsman