Dorian: An Imitation(Summer, 1981. Henry Wotton, gay, drugaddicted, and husband of Batface, the irrefutably aristocratic daughter of the Duke of This or That, is at the center of a clique dedicated to dissolution. His friend, artist Baz hallward, has discovered a young man who is the very epitome of male beauty--Dorian Gray. His installation, Cathode Narcissus, captures all of Dorian's allure end, perhaps, something else. After a night of debauchery, Wotton and Hallward are cauht in te hideous web of a rerrovirus that becomes synonymous with the decade. Sixteen years later Batface, lies dying in a Parisian underpass. But what of Wotton and Hallward? How have they fared as stocks soar and T-cell counts plummet? And what of Dorian? How is it that he remains so youthful among the wasted and the dead? Set against the AIDS eqidemic of the eighties and nineties, Will Self's Dorian is a shameless reworking of our most significant myth of shamelessness, brillintly evoking the decade in which it was fine to stare into the adyss, so long as you were wearing two pairs of Ray-Bans.) |
