Book Review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Another month, another classic selection by the book club and, sadly, another tedious read that I absolutely hated. Full of the supposedly witty epigrams for which Wilde was famous (and which Monty Python parodied so brilliantly), such as "there are only two kinds of people who are interesting: those who know nothing and those who know everything." [quoted from memory only - I can't be bothered to trawl the book for the accurate text]

Each of the male characters appears to be a thinly-veiled Oscar Wilde, and the book a vehicle for his pontifications on the state of the world and his place in it. His dialogue is stilted and wooden, his characters forget who they are talking to in every sentence and have to repeat each other's names to remind themselves, and he regularly changes perspective in the middle of a scene. With more judicious editing (or indeed, any editing at all) this would have made a very good short story. As a novel it's a royal snoozefest for the first 170 pages or so.

In particular, reading the passages where Dorian is diverting himself in various pursuits feels like one of those dreams where you're running as fast as you can and not getting anywhere. I'm not a huge fan of skim-reading but it was the only way I could crawl my way through this section. It was that, or give up on the book entirely. The scene where he convinces Campbell to dispose of the body is so ludicrous as to be laughable. I could sum it up as: "I want nothing to do with you Dorian. Oh, go on then, I'll get rid of your body for you." The pretext of a dreadful secret of Campbell's that Gray threatens to expose is not even foreshadowed.

The story finally picks up in the last few chapters but the payoff is hardly worth all the life you've wasted reading almost 200 pages to arrive at the "good bit" such as it is. Another candidate for this summer's book swap, I'm afraid.