“WILL Self’s Dorian is a shameless reworking of our most significant myth of shamelessness.” As publisher’s blurbs go, this is unusually accurate. It captures the brazen cheekiness of a writer appropriating another’s classic — in this case Oscar Wilde’s. And it pinpoints something central to the style, technique and purposes of Self’s prose: taboo busting irreverence, designed to unnerve you, whoever you are.

Dorian Gray, in this novel, is a wealthy Adonis, just down from Oxford in the early 1980s, and swept up in a dissolute Chelsea clique of drug-abusing artists, homosexuals and snobs. Over a period of 16 years, members of this group contract HIV related illnesses, while Dorian remains untouched by age or disease. The explanation lies in Cathode Narcissus, a video installation featuring Dorian’s naked beauty, that has aged and sickened in his place over the years.

Feeling himself immortal, Dorian becomes a sadistic criminal. He brutally murders several people on the gay scene in London and New York, and others by deliberately infecting them with the virus he carries with immunity.

Toward the end of the novel there is some suggestion that Dorian and his degenerate deeds are only fiction within fiction. But this is clumsily done and the perturbed reader will probably be past caring. A more likely path to redemption is Self’s persistent humour. This is a distinctive blend of childish facetiousness and rather erudite wit. Self’s best effects draw on a long tradition of very English comedy.

His malice is less interesting. Dorian begins the year of Princess Diana’s wedding and ends with her death in 1997. She is consistently abused as “the Royal Broodmare”. Sneering at Diana for raising awareness of Aids is at best puerile, at worst offensive. But this is exactly what Self intends. He is too talented a writer to arrive here by mistake.

His portrayal of gay culture is pure pastiche. He imagines “congas of buggery”, a community of clones, “a mutton army dressed as denim lambs”. But the laziness intrinsic to hyperbolic clichés seeps into his own language. Self is a provocative writer — unless you are a bigoted, homophobic, misogynist, racist aristocrat, his new novel will make you sick. No one will be more gratified than Self, so shamelessly eager to push satire to the limit.

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