Dorian: An Imitation » (Reprint)

Henry Wotton, gay, drug addicted, and husband of Batface, the irrefutably aristocratic daughter of the Duke of This or That, is at the center of a clique dedicated to dissolution. His friend Baz Hallward, an artist, has discovered a young man who is the very epitome of male beauty — Dorian Gray. His installation Cathode Narcissus captures all of Dorian's allure, and, perhaps, something else. Certainly, after a night of debauchery that climaxes in a veritable conga line of buggery, Wotton and Hallward are caught in the hideous web of a retrovirus that becomes synonymous with the decade. Sixteen years later the Royal Broodmare, as Wotton has dubbed her, lies dying in a Parisian underpass. But what of Wotton and Hallward? How have they fared as stocks soar and T-cell counts plummet? And what of Dorian? How is it that he remains so youthful while all around him shrivel and die? Set against the AIDS epidemic of the eighties and nineties, Will Self's Dorian is a shameless reworking of our most significant myth of shamelessness, brilliantly evoking the decade in which it was fine to stare into the abyss, so long as you were wearing two pairs of Ray-Bans.

The New Yorker

Subtitled "An Imitation," this reworking of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" transposes the story to a nineteen-eighties London of artists, aristos, junkies, and feverish promiscuity. The portrait is now a video installation, "Cathode Narcissus," and its original, Dorian, a beautiful, blank, omnisexual monster who remains immune to the AIDS epidemic, which claims most of the other characters. Mapping Wilde's era onto Thatcher's makes Self's grungy style incongruously mannered ("Oh jolly good, such a bore, smack"), as if Nancy Mitford and Johnny Rotten had decided to collaborate. The novel's sub-Wildean epigrams ("A witticism is merely the half-life of an emotion"), the ceaseless talk, and the preordained plot preclude any satisfying development. Self's bad-boy career, like his hero's, now spans slightly more than a decade. Perhaps in an attic somewhere he keeps a novel that displays the depth and maturity that are absent here.