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I don't know what I was quite expecting here. It's a psychological horror story with a lot of comic relief, in the form of the endless witty paradoxes. After page 30 you are thinking that if Lord Henry makes just one more crack you're going to knock his monocle off his family crest and grind it underfoot. Oscar often clearly thinks he's being hilarious with his wit with a capital W �� and maybe it's me, but Oscar Wilde often sounds like a parody of Oscar Wilde, like in the Monty Python sketch

WHISTLER: Your Majesty is like a stream of bat's piss.
(gasps)
THE PRINCE OF WALES: What?
WHISTLER: It was one of Wilde's.
OSCAR WILDE: I, um, I, ah, I merely meant, Your Majesty, that, ah, you shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.
THE PRINCE OF WALES:
Oh, ho-ho, very good.

But of course, some of it is very good stuff :

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.

The fact was, one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and to make matters worse, had actually brought her husband.

One of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies but are thoroughly disliked by their friends.

But his character Lord Henry goes on and on with the wit and the aphorisms

She is a peacock in everything but beauty…she tried to found a salon and only succeeded in opening a restaurant��. One can't stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

And you get a lot of guff about women

No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent society.

(that last one reminds me of the weird quote from Captain Beefheart �� "There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers". Oh, how rude of me �� Oscar, allow me to introduce Captain Beefheart.



Captain Beefheart, may I present Mr Oscar Wilde �� I believe you may have heard the name.

)

Then there's the necessarily undeclared but pretty open gayness. How the two older men worship this young Adonis Dorian �� they openly salivate! - and how he reciprocates too. He says to Lord Henry 30 minutes after meeting him :

I feel I must come with you. Do let me. And you will promise to talk to me all the time? No one talks so wonderfully as you do.

What a flirt. I don't think boys talk to each other like this anymore. They're a little more discreet these days.

So as the story saunters along, and at a couple of points you think there never will be a story, the banter and the brittle conversations die away and Dorian, his portrait miraculously ageing instead of him, realises he can "sin" without consequence. He turns into a vicious voluptuary, a promiscuous profligate, an effulgent epicurean and a licentious libertine. In time the word gets round, and society reacts with the strongest possible disapproval :

He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club�� and it was said that on one occasion when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out.

That would cut a fellow to the very quick, though, wouldn't it. What would be the modern equivalent? There isn't one.

Both Dorian and the novel turn strange. You might think that the life of a young handsome sensualist would consist of orgies and opium, roofies and deflorations, and maybe a black mass thrown in for kicks, with goats and orphans, but you would be wrong. Dorian plunges into a life of strange obsessions �� for ten pages we get elaborate lists of a) perfumes, b) jewels, c) tapestries, and d) world music �� yes, that came as a surprise to me too :

He used to give curious concerts in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes

So WOMAD then.




Dorian collects instruments like the furuparis, human bone flutes, sonorous green jaspers, the clarin, the teponazali, some yotl-bells and a Stratocaster made from the skulls of Tibetan lamas. No, I made up the last one. But this is a real quote : "he had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments". I was kind of disappointed. Is this really debauchery? I don't think Ozzy Osbourne would recognise it as such.

With the change of gear in the book, we find that Oscar can come out with some quite extraordinary sentences. Here is a favourite :

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

Oscar's solitary novel is a gothic tale of a man who came to think that he could commit sin without consequence. And he couldn't. It's either curiously conservative �� God will smite you down, there's no escape, and nor should there be �� or it's a coded message of revolution : the idle rich have got it coming to them. I think Oscar became a convert to some form of socialism round about the time he wrote his novel, so I'm going with the latter interpretation. It suits me. I think there are fifty shades of Dorian Gray even now cashing in their half million dollar bonuses and thinking that they'll be young and invulnerable forever. But vengeance will come like a thief in the night.