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Rating: 
Summary: Many people just don't like this sort of stuff...
Review: ...but I'd rather be one of the few who finds pleasure in Self's perversity than one of the many who see only perveristy in such pleasures (as those of the wanton that is Self's Henry Wotton).
Perhaps you should skip this tale if you:
) rarely find reinterpretations as enjoyable -- note that this is not the same as 'good' -- as an original or 'classic'
) are offended by repeated discussions of drugs, sex, homosexuality, precious bodily fluids, et cetera
) haven't read any of his other works; or have, and don't like such
) don't like it when authors make much wordplay or use obscure vocabulary which might require the reader to visit a dictionary
Note: I am a big fan of Mr. Self. You also may find his writing very entertaining if you don't fall into any of the above buckets. If you're interested in checking for yourself, I would recommend the short story collection _Grey Area_ or the novel _Great Apes_. (The only major book of his that I did not find highly enjoyable was _How the Dead Live_, which was a little tedious.)
So there you have my opinion. It's just that. But do take the reviews of those who panned this book as such as well. There's no accounting for taste; however, I personally recommend that you taste this account of a modern Dorian Gray. Terrible, I know;).
Rating: 
Summary: tedious game of intertextual hide and seek
Review: 110 years ago, the main character of Oscar Wilde's most scandalous as well as renowned novel initiated the destruction of his beautifully preserved, seemingly unspoilt yet profoundly corrupt self by stabbing his truth-revealing portrait. We all know that any "good" embodiment of evil - as well as any good plot - is doomed to return sooner or later, which is why it should not come as a great surprise to see the return of Dorian Gray. As stunningly beautiful as ever, he is out haunting London and New York, inflicting his virus of death and corruption onto everyone he comes in contact with. Will Self is honest enough to call his work an imitation, and it really is little more than that, which is both, the strength as well as the weakness of the book. Wilde's plot is, of course, ingenious, offering the reader a little bit of everything, including the tragic fall of its heroes, different moments of self-recognition, unrequited love, more or less outrageous erotic constellations, murder, a little touch of magic and so much more. It is therefore obvious, why Will Self has decided to stay true to the story-line and he does succeed in transposing these different elements and characters into the presence, giving them a new quality of authenticity and liveliness. At the same time, he keeps the reader entertained by involving him/her in a game of intertextual hide and seek, based on the activity of trying to identify by what name or in what shape certain characters or motifs of the original return in its new manifestation. However, any game is destined to become tedious if the problems involved can be solved too easily and that is what happens when an imitation is too obviously linked to its model. Yes, there is a nice little twist at the end of the story, which is interesting and gratifying to a certain extent, but you will have to go through 260 rather unexciting pages in order to get there. Of course, Will Self differs greatly from Wilde in a stylistic sense, but he does so to his disadvantage. Trying to be overly blunt and shockingly direct, especially in its depiction of gay sex or drug abuse, the text loses a great deal of the original's subtleness and attraction. After all, no-one really needed or wanted to know that Dorian's penis resembles the "dagger of an alien warlord" or that Baz's corpse looks like "human purée". Maybe this is the author's attempt to shock the reader and thereby give us a sense of what it must have been like to read The Picture of Dorian Gray as a Victorian at the end of the 19th Century, but the problem is that the text's potential shock-effect is drowned in a language that tries to be metaphorical, but does not engage the reader's imagination in an effective way. All in all, Dorian can be considered one more or less successful version of an imitation of Wilde's novel and you should read it if you want to find out how Dorian Gray gets on in the 80s and 90s of the last century or if you are looking to enhance your vocabulary by learning a couple of slang expressions.
Rating: 
Summary: Conga Line
Review: It was soon after I saw the movie "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" where Dorian Gray is one of the characters that I ran across Will Self's book and thought it'd be interesting to read his treatment of the character. The difficulty with the book is that no character is actually likeable, no one for whom to root. The updating of Oscar Wilde's mechanism of a painting that ages to a 3D video artpiece in which the young naked Dorian posed and whose video image ages is interesting enough. However, the novel is hardly complimentary to the gay community on which it focuses. The graphic scenes of sexual orgy actually get a bit boring as Self repeats his image of "conga line of bug***" so many times that it's more repetitive than interesting. Wotton's wife is called "Batface" for most of the book with no one remarking on the unkind cruelty of the denomination, but simple accepted as a matter of course. The novel also gets quite expansive with Gray going to Riverside County, California, which stretched the story without really adding to it. The reversal in the Epilogue with a story within a story seemed to be more of a mind game imposed on the tale by the author in an attempt to be clever than something which seemed to be necessary. Will Self does have some strengths. I found the book to be well paced, his prose has a uniqueness, and his vocabulary is very large. While the tale was interesting enough for a quick reading, it would surprise me if this stays in print long. Take it or leave it.
Rating:
Summary: Narcissism, surely the scourge of our age
Review: It was years ago that I read the Wilde classic, so I wasn't as I read Will Self's update consciously or otherwise thinking about the differences between the two and judging how it measures or fails to measure up to its more famous predecessor. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I enjoyed it while many others disliked it. As a standalone novel about narcissism - surely a contemporary social ill, if not the scourge of our age - I thought "Dorian" stood its own ground very well.
Self doesn't pull his punches in his depiction of the dissolute lifestyle of the upper classes. He seethes with barely concealed contempt for their amorality and their never-ending drug and sex orgies. There's not one sympathetic character among the lot. They're careless and callous of life - they dismiss somebody else's death by murder with the wave of a limp wrist - so when they catch AIDS and find the dagger pointing at their own throats, should anybody baulk ? Dorian is only the distillate and the end result of a values system that encourages if not promotes self worship.
Self's excessive wordplay - headache inducing as always - is only quintessentially Self. I'm sure he's added liberally to the English language. His graphic, no holds barred take on decadence is often unpleasant and shocking. His narrative technique is sometimes confusing as he takes us backwards and forwards in time, juxtaposing past events alongside current occurrences through the use of bedside confessions. We confront our horror just as the tale reaches its nadir when Dorian confuses himself with his airbrushed video images. The rest, as they say, is history.
"Dorian" isn't for everyone. It's nasty, graphic and violent but also eerily contemporary and necessary.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Other reviewers' complaints about this novel typically focus on what is graphically unpleasant about Self's depictions of his characters. Well, wake up. It isn't 1959 anymore, when this complaint was raised about William Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch. Will Self has created an extraordinarily inventive, imaginative rewriting of Wilde's novel, set in the 1980s and '90s. Only a writer as talented as Will Self could have achieved this re-vision so successfully. The novel is filled with brilliant one-liners, and the plot and characters have also been brilliantly re-imagined. Anyone who is bored by the tiresome "cleverness" of contemporary gay American fiction, with its endless pseudo-dilemmas (how is the protagonist supposed to choose between the cute do-gooder and the devilishly handsome studster who keeps tempting him?) will be grateful to be able to read a novel in which plot, character, and style actually conspire together to create something truly thoughtful and lasting.
Rating: 
Summary: Confusing
Review: This novel is at best confusing but still intriguing. Most of the time you aren't quite sure what is happening, since the book has a tendency to jump around a bit. But what I had loved it for was that it had captured the decandency of the original. Also was quite surprised too that Lord Henry Wotton was a bigger villain in this piece than the original. I loved the surprise ending.
Rating:
Summary: Wilde would not approve
Review: Wilde was a silver-tongued philosopher if there ever was one: his incisive witticisms weren't disembodied pretticisms, but a glittering facade for dark, multilayered meaning. In other words, he was a man of brilliant ideas and impeccable style, in many senses of the word. Will Self seems to be a man of mildly intriguing ideas and loathsome taste. The punchline of the book offers some insights on the purpose, function, and effect of art. Besides that, the book is a tedious, torturous read (besides being gory to the point of swift apathy and desensitization.) Self's voice is not only grating, but Self-congratulatory and Self-indulgent: he amuses himself with pointless, witless alliteration as often as his characters smoke, snort and shoot all kinds of hideous drug combinations. His treatment of his own characters is sadistic and completely lacking in affection. The book is built around several mildly interesting comparisons with Wilde's original; the last, revealed in the epilogue, being the strongest. And yes, it's sort of interesting to compare 'moral corruption' with the transmission of a virus for which there is no cure. But his ideas lose all appeal thanks to the voices of the narrator and his aggravating flock of junkies (I speak French and I found the constant turd-like dropping of 'bons mots' infuriating; I can't imagine what it would be like for someone who can't understand them at all....) Read the original and let your own imagination fit it to the context of the '80s and '90s.
Rating:
Summary: Wilde would not approve
Review: Wilde was a silver-tongued philosopher if there ever was one: his incisive witticisms weren't disembodied pretticisms, but a glittering facade for dark, multilayered meaning. In other words, he was a man of brilliant ideas and impeccable style, in many senses of the word. Will Self seems to be a man of mildly intriguing ideas and loathsome taste. The punchline of the book offers some insights on the purpose, function, and effect of art. Besides that, the book is a tedious, torturous read (besides being gory to the point of swift apathy and desensitization.) Self's voice is not only grating, but Self-congratulatory and Self-indulgent: he amuses himself with pointless, witless alliteration as often as his characters smoke, snort and shoot all kinds of hideous drug combinations. His treatment of his own characters is sadistic and completely lacking in affection. The book is built around several mildly interesting comparisons with Wilde's original; the last, revealed in the epilogue, being the strongest. And yes, it's sort of interesting to compare 'moral corruption' with the transmission of a virus for which there is no cure. But his ideas lose all appeal thanks to the voices of the narrator and his aggravating flock of junkies (I speak French and I found the constant turd-like dropping of 'bons mots' infuriating; I can't imagine what it would be like for someone who can't understand them at all....) Read the original and let your own imagination fit it to the context of the '80s and '90s.
Rating:
Summary: Dorian in the 80's!
Review: Will Self's update of Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray" seems to be hardly worth the effort as he seems to try and offend everyone by bringing it into the age of AIDS. To his credit, he faced an overwhelming task in updating this story and managed to handle it. It was not that difficult, for the plot was already there, he just needed to make a few twists in the story to place his name on it. Is it worth reading? You'll have to be the judge. Personally I wanted to stop reading after the first 100 pages, but in all fairness to the author, and hoping to better understand his take on this story, I struggled through to the end. Later I wondered why I bothered. The writing is laced with endless metaphors and similes, and I believe it's Self's stylish well-mannered wordplay that can turn the reader off and want to head straight to the dentist for a root canal, which is less painful.
In this story, Dorian is a young gay man in 1981 London who meets older gentlemen that include Henry Wotton and the artist Basil Hallward. Hallward produces a nine channel video of gorgeous Dorian, who he has fallen in love with, and captures the youthful beauty of Dorian forever, so he thinks. Dorian ends up aging only on tape, while in real life he stays handsome and young, but shows a mean streak as he goes around infecting everyone he meets with HIV. It all sounds too familiar, like "Patient Zero" from Randy Shilts book, "And the Band Played On". The books final pages contain a real surprise ending, but this didn't change my view of the book. It does seem like no one in this book escapes from Self's dislike of homosexuality, including most gay artists, and his blaming the plague on the sexual habits of gay men. This sounds familiar too, but we usually hear it only from the right side of the fence. There are a lot of problems with this story. The characters are boring, drug-induced, self-hating individuals who seem to have no redeeming qualities. Who could possibly want to know people like this? Dorian is supposed to be an overwhelming beauty that all these men are infatuated with, but instead Self gives us a Dorian who lacks any beauty, charm, emotion, or attractiveness. It's all totally boring! I had great hopes that this would be an exciting, emotional re-telling of a great piece of fiction that might compare a little to the original by Oscar Wilde, but that didn't happen. I could go on, but enough has been said. What a disappointment! Dorian should have never been transported to the 80's, that's for sure! Joe Hanssen
Rating:
Summary: Something different, please
Review: Will Self's updated version of Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" inevitably invites comparison with the original, and I'm afraid I thought that it came a poor second best. "Dorian" failed for me on several counts. Self (who at his best is an imaginative writer) just could not match Wilde's wit: for example, Wilde's Henry Wotton is a much more witty character than Self's. Wilde's novel had a certain Gothic horror underpinned by a subtle homosexual sub-plot (the latter necessarily so given the time it was written). Self, however, had no real need to allude to the homosexuality of his characters. Indeed, it's out there in the open, coupled with horror created by descriptions of AIDS and a sort of "American Psycho" sub-plot. No subtlety here then - quite the reverse. I felt that Self couldn't tear himself away from these themes. The trouble is that they weigh down the whole book, becoming tedious for the reader (or at least this one). That's not to belittle the fact that AIDS has had and continues to have a devasting effect, but I felt at times that Self was doing little more than indulging what I suspect might have been a fascination with descriptions of casual gay sex, cruising, SM bars and AIDS wards. When mixed together, they do not of themselves constitute an interesting novel. This might be because Self's chosen plot pandered to his favourite themes. Within the first 50 pages of "Dorian", the reader is in familiar Self territory: drug abuse and hospitals. I couldn't help getting the immediate feeling of "here we go again". I suppose that continued descriptions of drug abuse in Self's writing have just worn me down. I just don't find it in the least bit interesting any more. I much prefer Self's writing when he holds these obessions in check, and lets his imagination explore different subjects/themes. "Dorian" was, I'm afraid, inferior both to Wilde and to Self's other work. G Rodgers
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