Dorian: an imitation Will Self Viking, 278pp, £16.99 ISBN 0670889962

Henry Wotton (pronounced Wootton) is a Chelsea toff, "a rare combination of gung-ho drugging . . . and comme il faut tailoring". One fine day in 1981 - "It was noon, a noon in late June" - he drives his filthy, rubbish-cluttered Jaguar to the studio of his artist friend Baz Hallward, a journey of some 400 yards from his own front door. Same street, in fact. Not one for exercise, Henry.

He and Baz are both homosexual, but Baz is "out" and rather pompous about it, whereas Henry is the old-fashioned self-hating type and has married a duke's daughter for money.

Baz shows Henry his latest video installation. He won't be making any more. "The whole fucking medium is dead . . . From now on, conceptual art will degenerate to the level of crude autobiography." But he's proud of this piece, called Cathode Narcissus, a set of nine monitors that show videotapes of a naked young man swanning about. It symbolises "the first gay generation to come out of the shadows".

The model, a rich Oxford graduate called Dorian Gray, wanders in from Baz's bedroom to admire himself on the screen. He's just a little miffed that the images "will remain young for ever, while I grow old, then die . . . I wish it was the other way round."

Unlike Oscar Wilde's original Dorian, who wanted his portrait in oils to age on his behalf, he does not say he would give his soul to bring this about. By the 1980s people had stopped having souls. But because Will Self is engaged on an overt homage to Wilde, we know broadly what is coming.

Once the Cathode Narcissus is installed in Dorian's flat, he throws a "vernissage" party, inviting along one of his bits of rough, a junkie rent boy who carries an as-yet-unknown virus. The evening proceeds, via a great deal of needle-sharing, to "what can only be described as a conga line of buggery".

Ten years later, in consequence, Henry and Baz are pretty poorly with Aids. Dorian, although he has by now infected thousands of people in London, New York and elsewhere, never shows any symptoms. He hasn't aged a day, either. As for the Narcissus, that is locked away in his attic. Baz makes the fatal mistake of asking to see it.

At certain points, Self's version of the tale corresponds closely to Wilde's. Henry's dislike of exercise comes from the original. So does the gag about the difficulty of getting up to no good in the country. And the remark that anyone who calls a spade a spade should be forced to use one. (Wilde had a major hang-up about spade-callers.)

Henry, as in the Wilde novel, is the character who dishes out most of the epigrams. These, while sticking to a Wildean formula, vary in quality. "The poor may take the occasional cheap day return to oblivion, but only the rich may maintain a villa there." "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."

Often, though, Self is just being Self, as in this description of the Albert Memorial - "the eponymous consort sat in his rococo rocket looking colossally constipated, as if he were about to evacuate himself into space" - or this striking little drug-fuelled fantasy of Henry's: "The soles of your feet snagged and scratched by twigs, sap smearing your calves, you proceed on tiptoes across the treetops of Battersea Park . . ."

The book is as funny, and as entertainingly nasty, as you would expect. Otherwise the object of the exercise remains fairly obscure. On the first page, Self suggests that the 1880s and the 1980s were both characterised by "a government at once progressive and regressive", a "succession crisis" in the monarchy and an "economic recession both sharp and bitter", which, if partly true, is of more interest to social historians than to the average novel-reader. The idea of Dorian Gray as a zeitgeist figure, representing a corrupt culture obsessed with youth and appearances, is viable, but too thunderingly obvious to be the real point. Deeper levels are implied by the references to Henry's garden, which eerily blooms all year round, and the autistic man who always stands rocking like a "human metronome" in one window of a nearby tower block.

An epilogue reveals that we have been reading a book-within-a-book, written by Henry, and that the "real" characters are not much like the ones he has portrayed. He himself was not a toff at all, nor is his wife, and Dorian is a harmless publisher with no secrets in his attic. But then this "reality" starts to give way, invaded by Henry's fiction, and the story disappears up its own fundament. All in all, perhaps there is nowhere else for it to go.

Hugo Barnacle is a novelist and critic

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