Many of us are better with the sort of pruned simplicity advocated here, in a post wonderfully entitled ''Don't Use Said', He Bellowed: Creative Writing Lessons From the Primary School Classroom' - and only the occasional decorative flourish to mix it up. Such profusion and richness of language as Self uses is a precarious act - most people can't get away with their attempts at this, making a long series of risible pratfalls as can be seen all over sites like this one, including in not a few of my old posts. (Always been a big fan of his non-fiction, the stories less so.) I doubt I'll ever read a better re-write of a classic - those things are not known even for being good, but this is superlative. And I greatly prefer it to any of Will Self's other fiction I've read.

Sacreligiously, I prefer this to Wilde's original. It is difficult to ignore his archly exaggerated media persona, but this one was much more interesting and memorable than I expected. This is only the second Self book I have read after the atypical The Book of Dave, which I read a few years ago and did not really impress me. But Self doesn't leave it there, the last few pages twist it again to give the whole thing a fittingly macabre conclusion. This Gray has a successful advertising business and is involved in New Labour, and the manuscript is revealed as the product of Wotton's warped imagination. Gray, who is still alive, is presented with the story by the widowed Victoria Wotton, as a manuscript written by Henry and discovered after his death. The epilogue is a rather clever metafictional game. The main body of the novel ends with the deaths of Gray and Wotton. The book gets much more interesting towards the end.

Both Wotton and Gray are portrayed as much more vicious characters than in Wilde's original. The updates work fairly naturally - Basil Hallward's picture becomes a video installation, and Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray move from the narcissism of the gay scene of early 80s London and New York to the dark shadow of AIDS in the late 80s and early 90s. He is never able to resist showing off his knowledge of linguistic obscurities, peppers the book with a huge range of both high and low brow references, and he also revels in some pretty grisly and unsavoury scenes, so it is not a book for the easily offended. For much of the book Self mirrors the original narrative, though his wit is more heavy-handed than Wilde's and his excesses are more extreme. It is basically an updated version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, starting in 1981 and finishing in 1997. Another book from the 2002 Booker longlist, this is a book full of surprises.

Dorian by will self