Customer Reviews

Dorian: An Imitation

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

This is an excellent updating of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, moving the action up to the 1980s-1990s of London, New York, and LA. The prose style is rich and erudite. The pages are larded with faux Wilde epigrams that sparkle and shimmer.

What keeps it interesting, even when you think you know where it's going, is that there are two very interesting twists at the end. I would like to think that Wilde would approve. Lots of famous names are dropped: Warhol, Princess Di, Barbara Bush, Versace, etc., so our more modern times of pop culture are vividly portrayed.

The novel is often graphic in its detail of the free-living Manhattan sex clubs right before (and then full into) the AIDS era. The scenes involving drug usage are not for the squeamish. The vocabulary alternates between the philosophy classroom and the filthy gutter.

Some of the characterizations are marvelous, especially a rich old guy called The Ferret. I was amazed at how the author stayed so close to the original, yet made everything seem his own.

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.

110 years ago, the main character of Oscar Wilde's most scandalous as well as renowned novel initiated the destruction of his beautifully preserved, seemingly unspoilt yet profoundly corrupt self by stabbing his truth-revealing portrait.

We all know that any "good" embodiment of evil - as well as any good plot - is doomed to return sooner or later, which is why it should not come as a great surprise to see the return of Dorian Gray. As stunningly beautiful as ever, he is out haunting London and New York, inflicting his virus of death and corruption onto everyone he comes in contact with.

Will Self is honest enough to call his work an imitation, and it really is little more than that, which is both, the strength as well as the weakness of the book. Wilde's plot is, of course, ingenious, offering the reader a little bit of everything, including the tragic fall of its heroes, different moments of self-recognition, unrequited love, more or less outrageous erotic constellations, murder, a little touch of magic and so much more. It is therefore obvious, why Will Self has decided to stay true to the story-line and he does succeed in transposing these different elements and characters into the presence, giving them a new quality of authenticity and liveliness. At the same time, he keeps the reader entertained by involving him/her in a game of intertextual hide and seek, based on the activity of trying to identify by what name or in what shape certain characters or motifs of the original return in its new manifestation.

However, any game is destined to become tedious if the problems involved can be solved too easily and that is what happens when an imitation is too obviously linked to its model. Yes, there is a nice little twist at the end of the story, which is interesting and gratifying to a certain extent, but you will have to go through 260 rather unexciting pages in order to get there. Of course, Will Self differs greatly from Wilde in a stylistic sense, but he does so to his disadvantage. Trying to be overly blunt and shockingly direct, especially in its depiction of gay sex or drug abuse, the text loses a great deal of the original's subtleness and attraction. After all, no-one really needed or wanted to know that Dorian's penis resembles the "dagger of an alien warlord" or that Baz's corpse looks like "human purée". Maybe this is the author's attempt to shock the reader and thereby give us a sense of what it must have been like to read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Victorian at the end of the 19th Century, but the problem is that the text's potential shock-effect is drowned in a language that tries to be metaphorical, but does not engage the reader's imagination in an effective way.

All in all, Dorian can be considered one more or less successful version of an imitation of Wilde's novel and you should read it if you want to find out how Dorian Gray gets on in the 80s and 90s of the last century or if you are looking to enhance your vocabulary by learning a couple of slang expressions.

I was surprised to find that this book was published in 2001. Much of it seems so dated: the glorification of the NY meat packing district, where sexual activity enters the realm of surgery, as the epitome of sinful evil; the false heroics of AIDS deaths; drug habits as proof of living on the wild side - I thought we had moved beyond all that, and much of it struck me as vaguely ludicrous rather than shocking or hair-raising.
Worse, the device of repeating Wilde's classic story in a modern setting invites continuous comparison with the original, which, not surprisingly, doesn't turn out well for Mr. Self. His Henry Wotton is a very pale shadow indeed of his ancestor, his self-conscious attempts at epigrammatic wit no match for the true brilliance of Wilde's example. It is his unveracious baroque style of expression rather than the content of his words that is hilarious - simply because it is ridiculous within the late 20th century context.
The inevitable gay-novel staple of hordes of men, including the author himself, drooling over a gorgeous boy is exploited at very, very tiresome lengths. All the more tiresome because Will Self gives us very little reason to feel the lure of Dorian; he is a thoroughly repulsive character, exuding non of the mystery or naiveté of the original. But then, all characters in this book are repulsive in one way or another. I'm glad they're fictional, because I wouldn't want to run the risk of meeting one of them in real life, ever! Only with the likes of Brett Easton Ellis will you find this kind of sustained cynicism and brutality - so possibly if you like his works, you may like this one. For me the complete lack of recognizable human emotion, the total absence of even a hint of warmth in any of the protagonists, rendered the book unreadable. An overwrought sex drive and a drug habit alone do not constitute interesting characters! I didn't finish it, actually, though the clue would have been clear to me long before the end even without one of my fellow reviewers in these pages giving it away: it is advertised with almost amateurish pride in a transparent lay-out dodge. For the benefit of those of you still wanting to read this book, I will not repeat the spoiler, even though, as may be clear, I sincerely doubt there is very much to spoil here.

When I ordered this book I was really looking forward to it. I have enjoyed quite a few of Will Self's other books but, I was disappointed. Self's writing is still clever, his characterizations of bitter old queens is fabulous, the setting was very good. His placement of the story at the dawn of the AIDS era was very smart, however the book itself falls flat. There are bright spots here and there, but the story as a whole seems lackluster.

I feel the ending was a bit of overkill and entirely unecessary. All in all despite Will Self's wit, I don't really recommend this particular book.

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.

Wilde was a silver-tongued philosopher if there ever was one: his incisive witticisms weren't disembodied pretticisms, but a glittering facade for dark, multilayered meaning. In other words, he was a man of brilliant ideas and impeccable style, in many senses of the word. Will Self seems to be a man of mildly intriguing ideas and loathsome taste.

The punchline of the book offers some insights on the purpose, function, and effect of art. Besides that, the book is a tedious, torturous read (besides being gory to the point of swift apathy and desensitization.)

Self's voice is not only grating, but Self-congratulatory and Self-indulgent: he amuses himself with pointless, witless alliteration as often as his characters smoke, snort and shoot all kinds of hideous drug combinations. His treatment of his own characters is sadistic and completely lacking in affection.

The book is built around several mildly interesting comparisons with Wilde's original; the last, revealed in the epilogue, being the strongest. And yes, it's sort of interesting to compare 'moral corruption' with the transmission of a virus for which there is no cure. But his ideas lose all appeal thanks to the voices of the narrator and his aggravating flock of junkies (I speak French and I found the constant turd-like dropping of 'bons mots' infuriating; I can't imagine what it would be like for someone who can't understand them at all....)

Read the original and let your own imagination fit it to the context of the '80s and '90s.

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.

It was soon after I saw the movie "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" where Dorian Gray is one of the characters that I ran across Will Self's book and thought it'd be interesting to read his treatment of the character. The difficulty with the book is that no character is actually likeable, no one for whom to root. The updating of Oscar Wilde's mechanism of a painting that ages to a 3D video artpiece in which the young naked Dorian posed and whose video image ages is interesting enough. However, the novel is hardly complimentary to the gay community on which it focuses. The graphic scenes of sexual orgy actually get a bit boring as Self repeats his image of "conga line of bug***" so many times that it's more repetitive than interesting. Wotton's wife is called "Batface" for most of the book with no one remarking on the unkind cruelty of the denomination, but simple accepted as a matter of course. The novel also gets quite expansive with Gray going to Riverside County, California, which stretched the story without really adding to it. The reversal in the Epilogue with a story within a story seemed to be more of a mind game imposed on the tale by the author in an attempt to be clever than something which seemed to be necessary. Will Self does have some strengths. I found the book to be well paced, his prose has a uniqueness, and his vocabulary is very large. While the tale was interesting enough for a quick reading, it would surprise me if this stays in print long. Take it or leave it.