Will Self: Dorian: An Imitation

By LINDA HERRICK

Oscar Wilde was accused of some crimes but lack of originality was not among them. Witty, epithetic, brittle, his comedies satirised brilliantly the vacuity of Victorian upper society. Then there came the sinister Portrait of Dorian Gray, a left-turn for Wilde.

Dorian was a clever devil, a sadist's wish-fulfilment, physically uncorrupted by depravity while his canvas alter ego putresced hideously in the attic. Written in 1899, Dorian was a fin de siecle creature whose idea has remained attractive ever since.

Now English writer Will Self, once famed for snorting heroin on John Major's election campaign plane because he was bored, has let the nasty creature out again, this time in London for a decade from 1981, bookended by the marriage and then the solo "socialite-activist" days of Princess Di.

Decadent aristo Henry Wotton, married but definitely gay in a cool, offhand way, has a serious relationship with hard drugs and a relatively casual one with a former lover, the conceptual artist Baz Hallward.

Baz is distracted by his new discovery, a beautiful, petulant and not terribly bright man called Dorian Gray. Baz has made his greatest work, a video installation, Cathode Narcissus, which depicts nine simultaneous films of the nude Dorian. "Personally I'm jealous of the bloody thing - it's already hours younger than me," whines Dorian early on in the book.

But the basis of his complaint is reversed during an apocryphal, night-long, drugged-up "conga line of buggery" which delivers the seed of long-term fatal infection to all except ... Dorian. The next morning he returns to his grotty flat to discover, on the nine screens, "the faces had all changed - and for the worse".

The process has begun; no matter what excesses Dorian commits, and he does, attaining to sado-masochistic murders and mass infecting, nothing can touch him - although with the years the VCR tapes start to erode and then he's in some trouble.

Meanwhile, Wotton deals with the rigours of Aids with a startling cocktail of prescribed and proscribed drugs, increasingly suspicious of his unblemished friend who has become a celeb among the international jet set on both sides of the Atlantic as tales of his wickedness become legendary. Wotton is determined that this monster must be extinguished, but which is the more cunning?

In the end, you just don't care. Much as I love the writing of Will Self, his cynicism, his dictionary-chewing vocabulary and his withering disdain for the institutions of British society all boil down to an exercise in supercilious cleverness.

Phrases like "extempore rodomontade", "anfractuous rocks", "prognathous jaw" - typical Self-isms - keep you working, as usual, and his languid collusion of unreal characters doing unreal things takes you along a too-familiar path as well.

Self first took up Dorian as a screenwriting effort, which fell over, but so taken was he with the concept he kept going. In some ways I'm glad. It's an amusing read, a tease and, of course, hugely politically incorrect.

Gay men might find it offensive. So might conceptual artists. He'd like that. But Dorian is not so much a homage to Wilde's creation as a relatively listless recycle of Self as he has written before. Is he in danger of becoming a caricature of himself?

Henry Wotton is fond of drawling out French bons mots - "never [use] an English phrase where a French tag would do". One comes to mind here: deja vu. Oh, but Self is still a clever chap though. Dorian has a completely disorienting epilogue that keeps twisting around in your (by now) spinning head. I had to read it again. Now that is deja vu.

* Penguin/Viking $54.95

* Linda Herrick is the Herald arts editor.