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Picture of ill-health

This article is more than 21 years old
Neil Bartlett is impressed by Will Self's updated version of Wilde's infamous creation, Dorian

Dorian: An Imitation
by Will Self
288pp, Viking, £16. 99

Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray is one of a select band of literary creations who have escaped the confines of their original format. Although punished by death for his sins of transgression in the 1891 novel that bears his name, his nasty end, far from concluding his narrative, merely dramatises the moment of his passing beyond our moralising control into a lurid afterlife of post-humous reinvention.

Like the other still-popular undead of 19th-century fiction - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr Frankenstein and his creature, La Dame aux Camélias - both Dorian's image and its infectious attendant meanings are familiar to audiences who have never encountered him in his native prose habitat. It's not just a question of having seen one of the legion of plays, musicals, films or operas in which he's had himself reincarnated; this eternally and dangerously desirable young beauty, with his hideous secret locked away in the attic, is a creation so potent that his very name can evoke a mythology.

When passages from the novel were read out in court number one of the Old Bailey as circumstantial evidence of Wilde's otherwise un-nameable sins, the accompanying convulsion of self-righteousness was the defining climax of a decade of festering Victorian unease. Now we, a century after Wilde's death, sense another era of peculiarly English unease and confusion. Will Self, doubtless feeling, like the rest of us, a distinct lack of appropriate contemporary cultural convulsion, has decided to create one of his own, using Wilde's virulent, terminally sophisticated, curiously impassioned original as his alibi. And, suitably, a very clever, indulgent, heartfelt, perverse, humorous and nasty affair it is.

Self's Dorian subtitles itself "an imitation", and that it is exactly what it is, in the full Wildean sense. It flatters its original by taking both subject and style entirely seriously. The locations, characters, plot and epigrams are all transposed from the 1890s to the 1990s, chapter by inexorable chapter. Little is materially altered, but everything is reused - sharpened, blackened and intensified by Self's idiosyncratic remix of Wilde's combination of wit and rage, extravagant debauchery with clinical introspection.

The transpositions, spiked with name-dropping, illuminate both the historic original and their contemporary setting; they are also, shamelessly, fun. The original's picture, a Sargent-via-Whistler oil painting, becomes a Viola-via-Warhol video installation. Dorian's first victim, a teenage Whitechapel actress called Sybil, becomes a teenage Soho rentboy called Herman, his suicidal overdose of heroin doing duty for her prussic acid. Henry Wotton, Wilde's vitriolic, magisterially affected, blackly camp Chelsea queen of ceremonies, becomes... well, Henry Wotton: vitriolic, magisterially affected, blackly camp - proof that nothing much about London haute queenery, its sexual tastes or its parasitic relationship with the upper classes, has changed.

He is a glorious creation, and just as Wilde's Wotton was a self-portrait, this one is in part surely a Self-portrait - he certainly gets the best lines. Dorian remains, as he must, a blond enigma, but his life and times are transposed with tour de force exactitude. From the basement of the Mineshaft in 1982 to Klosters with the Windsors a decade later, he's always where he should be.

Two contentious contemporary mythologies frame and reflect this new Dorian's deadly progress through 20 years of the new fin de siècle. Diana, as blonde, ingenuous and seemingly indestructible as Dorian himself, is glimpsed at the key points where her career intersects with his: the wedding, the much-photographed visit to an Aids patient, the Panorama interview, the newsflashes from the Paris underpass - all mediated, like Dorian's video-portrait itself, via the deadpan glamour of the TV screen.

Meanwhile, the original Dorian's mysterious ability to infect his associates with disaster and decay while remaining immune to their ravages himself is here given a name; he is an asymptomatic carrier of Aids, while his portrait collects the disease in wounds, scars and side-effects. Self graphically, economically and accurately recreates the nightmare stages both of the disease and of the English epidemic as it devastates the novel's cast. And at every stage the obscene monosyllable's mythology of infection, retribution and martyrdom cleverly interacts with the symbolism of Dorian's own splendidly shameless and heartless body, enriching both while never collapsing into obvious parallels.

Of course, this being the 20th not the 19th fin de siècle, and Self being the writer he is, he ups both the body count and the sexual explicitness. In the original, Dorian is accused of virtually every crime, but is never actually nailed as a sodomite. In Self's version, Wilde's dark hints are elaborated into full-blown and fully enacted queerness (of several accurately detailed varieties) for all the protagonists. In addition, where the original limits addictions to cigarettes and opium, Self supplements these primitive pleasures with a pharmacopoeia of class A drugs. His narrator lavishes a pornographer's breathless exactitude on the physical practicalities of intoxication; in several exhilarating passages not only the prose but even the narrative itself swoons, lurches and tumesces in a brilliantly realised simulacrum of chemical derangement.

And then, just where the story ought to end, it doesn't. Reviewer's protocol forbids me, dear reader, even to hint at those 20 pages - let me just say that the final twist, extending the story beyond Wilde's own ending, pays full homage to the original's genuinely unheimlich ability to disturb. Once again, it seems, Wilde's text has achieved a perverse, posthumous triumph over the forces of narrative decency. Self's reincarnation of Dorian has taken the fag ends of both an English century and an English myth and given them new, troubling and hugely entertaining life.

· Neil Bartlett is the artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith. His novels include Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (Serpent's Tail)

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