Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Dorian by Will Self, reviewed by The Atlantic Monthly

Tuesday, February 25th, 2003

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Dorian
by Will Self

From Ingenu to Omnivore
A Review by Thomas Mallon

It was inevitable -- and what's more, it's a piece of luck -- that Will Self would get around to writing an updated version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. His fiction, from Cock & Bull (1993) through Grey Area (1996) and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1999), has been full of doppelgängers and replicants, and the story of a depraved man who gets to keep his looks while his portrait ages was bound to appeal to a writer who, near the beginning of his career, posited a "Quantity Theory of Insanity," according to which "any attempts to palliate manifestations of insanity in one sector of society can only result in their upsurge in some other area of society." Oscar Wilde's novel is a similar zero-sum game, between Art and Nature.

In Dorian, which takes place from 1981 to the late 1990s, the painter Basil Hallward now goes by the nickname "Baz," and the oil portrait of the eponymous pretty boy has become a piece of conceptual art on nine video monitors; nonetheless, it works the same magic of surrogate decay. Hallward and Dorian remain in thrall to Lord Henry Wotton, a mannered, married, epigram-spouting arriviste, under whose lizardlike tutelage the new Dorian progresses, rather as before, from "ingénu to omnivore." He eventually far exceeds his mentor in every form of excess and depravity. And yet by the early 1990s it's Wotton who's in and out of an AIDS ward, while Dorian remains immune from the least wrinkle, let alone HIV.

Writing a whole fin de siècle later, Self has, not surprisingly, upped the sex-and-violence quotient beyond anything Wilde could have dared. It gives away nothing to say that Dorian (still) kills Basil Hallward, but what a difference a century makes when it comes to the corpse! "Had it not been for the red jagged tear in the neck," Wilde wrote, "and the clotted black pool that was slowly widening on the table, one would have said that the man was simply asleep." Self's Baz winds up as "a large helping of person purée."

If the gay sex in Dorian Gray was fuzzily implied (Wilde could even deny it was there from the witness box at his first trial), in Dorian it's generically explicit. Self writes much better about drug taking, a subject of long-standing personal experience and literary virtuosity for him. AIDS, in which drugs can figure along with sex, is a sort of chilling bonanza for this author, who produces some of the most arresting images of the disease since Adam Mars-Jones's stories in The Darker Proof (1988). Self writes,

The quivering shaft of Eros's arrow...was loosed and flew up Shaftesbury Avenue, a deathly love missile aimed by the renters straight at the junkies who huddled outside Hall's the chemist. The junkies caught it, transformed it into a hypodermic and flung it right back down again.

Wilde, in a moment of thrill-seeking aestheticism, pronounced Dorian a "son of Love and Death"; in Self's book there's nothing abstract about the coitus and spawn of those two things.

Parallel hunting between one novel and the other makes for readerly pleasure (as near as I can tell, the pretty actress Sibyl Vane, thrown over by the original Dorian, has become Herman, the cute mop-topped addict), but Self would have no chance at all if he couldn't at least hold a candle to Wilde's nonstop cleverness and wordplay. A fool's dare for a writer? Probably; but Self stays in the game to a remarkable extent, pronouncing Dorian a "jaded raptor"; noting the Harrods mannequin "squeezed inside a...tube of Versace"; telling us that the lights in Wotton's house "gushed wanness." He does his best to imitate the master's style ("Pleasure is Nature's credit rating"), and more than once has Wotton actually quote Wilde, with only the most minor variation and no attribution: "I shall have to die beyond my means"; "For Baz to have died once would have been unfortunate; for him to die twice looks like carelessness." It is pointless to think of this as thievery, because the modernized Dorian creates a world in which Wilde's existence cannot be allowed to have occurred. Had he ever lived, all the current characters would be on to the plot, not to mention the odd coincidence of their own names. Wilde's banishment amid the continuation of all else is a curious homage, a reverse index of immortal stature.

Like his precursor, Self has made the nature of wit one of his novel's themes. His Wotton defines a witticism as "merely the half-life of an emotion," and the AIDS-stricken Baz comes to think of epigram itself as a sort of disease: "He was being swept away by this snide cataract...with quipsters vying for opportunities to torpedo meaningful conversation." Wilde famously prefaced Dorian Gray with an assertion that would later play a part in sending him to prison: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." This is the Wotton position, but Wilde actually had his doubts. The original Dorian insists that he was corrupted by Wotton's present of J. K. Huysmans's decadent novel À Rebours -- unnamed in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but acknowledged by Wilde to be the work he had in mind when his narrator asserted that "Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book." In Self's Dorian it's a nice touch, a deliberate tribute to verbal potency, that the corrupting gift is not some current literary analogue of Huysmans's book but still À Rebours itself.

The new Wotton doesn't give the new Dorian a copy of American Psycho -- the book one almost expects will turn up, because Self sees the Bret Easton Ellis novel as a serious critique of society's moral decay. And moral decay is something Self has not been embarrassed to say he's bothered by. He has written of his belief in evil as something resident in the world and our natures; while discussing serial murderers, in 1994, he declared himself "inclined to see both the killers and the society that obsessively contemplates them as involved in a colossal fabrication of collective memory and moral perception." Wilde got much more agitated about hypocrisy than murder.

Even though Self is now past forty, his exuberant talents remain annoyingly free from certain kinds of editorial discipline. His narrative voice can be less stable than a unicycle, and he still has the tendency to get so bored with his own literary enterprises that he will light out, sometimes in midbook, for an entirely new plot or theme. In Dorian that happens only toward the end, in a variation on the old it-was-all-a-dream palinode. Self's epilogue reveals the wildly homicidal Dorian to have been a fictional send-up by Henry Wotton -- that is, what we've been reading all along was the late Lord's meanspirited novel. The "real" Dorian turns out to be an entrepreneurial, PC, New Labour-voting, mainstreamed gay man with a "mature pride in homosexual identity -- not a pride based on militant identification with an underclass, or a persecuted ethnic minority, but the true pride that came with assuming the responsibility proper to an era, when for the first time gay men and lesbian women were openly assuming positions of power." Which is to say, a puffed-up real-life type just begging to be satirized.

The Age of Diana, of which this third Dorian is a representative part, has in many ways, however incidentally, been Self's best subject all along. The novel runs from the princess's wedding to her funeral, and nothing fires up the author like the "Royal Fag Hag," whose "grazed heart [cries] out for a Band-aid, while she shops 'til every last equerry drops." But Self's closer-to-real-life satirical epilogue, where he can really go to town on all this, gets started too late, and even before its twenty pages are fully under way, the author retreats from social texturing back into phantasmagoria. This is a shame, because as good as much of Dorian is, the epilogue goes it one better.

Even so, no matter: Di's era will always be there, forever young on a million videotapes, for Self to come back to, long after its participants have gotten, as Nature intended, the faces they deserve.