Dorian Gray as the picture of depravity

Will Self’s new novel, “Dorian,” takes Oscar Wilde’s famous fable “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and updates it to the early, greedy ‘80s, when decadence reigned supreme. AIDS (and AIDS as a murder weapon -- Dorian is suspected of being the AIDS Mary, “the malevolent and intentional transmitter of the virus”), drugs (there are many scenes of shooting up) and sexual misconduct: Self’s “Dorian” has them all.

Henry Wotton becomes a “junky Pan” whose appetite for debauchery is insatiable. Basil -- now Baz -- Hallward’s portrait becomes a video installation titled “Cathode Narcissus,” in which beautiful Dorians prance ceaselessly on nine television monitors. Self’s version is pretty faithful to the original, retaining all the main characters (while adding in a few extra), but in their vision and sensibility, Wilde and Self could not be more different. Though Wilde’s Gray inhabited a seductive, golden and beautiful world, Self has created a world that is irredeemably sordid, where neither beauty nor charm nor intelligence has any value. Dirt, debauchery and drugs reign supreme.

In his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Edmund White comments, “[A] careless or naive reader, especially during the Victorian period, could have entirely missed that ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ is a gay book.” No one would make that mistake here. There’s far too much graphic detail for that, but the male characters are generally so unpleasant that one could be forgiven for reading “Dorian” instead as a violently homophobic work. Given Self’s much-vaunted liberalism, this seems unlikely to have been intentional.

Set in a languid, dirty London in the summer of 1981, “Dorian” is littered with Self’s showy, trademark erudition. He always writes as if he had a dictionary by his side (requiring the reader to do the same), as if his intention is to be as densely impenetrable as possible. Yet there’s a kind of carelessness about the work, which seems to be at odds with his laboriously researched vocabulary. Self has never concealed the fact that one of his main aims, possibly his primary intention, is to shock. The late Princess Diana comes in for some of his most unbridled invective; he refers to her variously as the “Princess of Bulimia,” “Her Royal Regurgitation, the Princess of Clothes” and “Thickie Spencer.” This will obviously alienate some readers, but Self clearly doesn’t give a fig.

It’s difficult to tell what he does care about. There’s a terrible emptiness to it all, which, I imagine, Self might defend by insisting that the tone is appropriate because there was an emptiness both to the time and to the people about whom he is writing. As Wotton, who contracts AIDS after a night of debauchery, tells Hallward, “ ... the eighties was Dorian’s decade -- he reveled in every opportunity that London offered him to assume an imposture.” At the same time, it’s impossible not to admire Self’s ferocious energy; like the demented killer from a slasher movie, he lashes out, randomly attacking a variety of targets, including Barbara Bush, whom he describes as closely resembling “a male-to-female transsexual,” adding, “rubicund features and a white smoke cloud of hair suggested she would be more comfortable on the front step of some Appalachian log cabin, corncob pipe in puckered mouth, whiskey jar to hand.”

Some of his epigrams are brilliant (though perhaps not entirely original): “A man can be happy with any woman as long as he doesn’t love her”; “When you fall in love ... you join the ranks of the self-deceived ... and by the time it’s all over you’ve enrolled everyone else”; “Death is first and foremost a career move” and so on.

Shortly before the end of the book, Self’s narrative deviates sharply from Wilde’s, and the difference makes, as it were, all the difference. “Dorian” ends with a whimper rather than a bang, in a cop-out epilogue that makes it even harder to forgive all that has gone before. It’s a nasty little book, but ultimately Self seems somewhat to lose his nerve. Yes, Dorian gets his comeuppance, just as he does in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” but while Wilde’s ending is perfectly crafted, Self’s is messy, drawn-out and, like so much of his book, very self-indulgent.