Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, 254 pages

The story is familiar.  As the result of a rash prayer, a young dandy is cursed - physically he will never change, but his portrait will.  Seduced willingly into a life of debauchery, outwardly he remains the beautiful young man, but his portrait becomes increasingly hideous, reflecting the degeneration of his soul.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is, at its heart, a fairy tale, a fable exploring the connection between goodness and beauty which Wilde, along with the rest of Victorian England, learned from Ruskin.  The novel is far from perfect.  The early romance between Gray and an actress never rises above melodramatic cliche.  The cascade of witticisms that emerges from the mouths of Gray and Lord Henry now suffers from a combination of antiquity and familiarity.  Yet although the central message - that all sin is a form of self-mutilation, however the sinner may have been self-anaesthetized - is at least as old as Plato, Wilde's dramatization is memorable enough to make the old truth young again.