Dorian: An Imitation

by WillSelf (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.28

  It is 1981 and the Royal Broodmare , as Henry Wotton calls her, is about to be married. Wotton, an uneasy homosexual and an egregious drug-addict, and his friend Baz have found a remarkable young man Dorian Gray, the epitome of male beauty. 16 years later and the Princess is dead. As the stock market soars and their T-cell counts plummet, what has happened to Henry and Baz? And how does Dorian remain so youthful? Will Self's excoriating new novel is set against the AIDS crises of the '80s and '90s, and is a shameless reworking of our most shameless classic novel.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.15

  '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...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...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' - Guardian .