Dorian, an Imitation

Dorian, an Imitation

Will Self

Will Self's Dorian is a "shameless imitation" of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray that reimagines the novel in London's early-80s art scene, which for liberated homosexuals was a golden era of sex, drugs and decadence before the AIDS epidemic struck later in the decade. It is "an age in which appearances matter more and more and more. Only the shallowest of people won't judge by them." Young Dorian Gray, just out of school, is a trust-funded, impressionable Adonis with none of the cynicism of the people who end up corrupting his innocence even as they love him for it. The artist Baz Hallward falls for him at once and makes him the subject of a video installation, Cathode Narcissus, in which Dorian is surrounded by nine television monitors showing images of himself looking into a mirror. Through Baz, Dorian meets Henry Wotton, a rich, witty and affectless aristocrat, boozer and cokehead in a loveless marriage of convenience. Eager to see Dorian "thoroughly pleasure this jaded century" with his unrivalled looks and money, Wotton takes him under his wing and leads him into a world of drug addicts and hangers-on. A social chameleon, Dorian soon becomes as superficial as everyone around him, a seducer par excellence, while the years pass, the epidemic takes hold of his friends, and he alone never seems to age.