Wilde with extra filth

Will Self's update of Wilde's classic a century on is smart, bleak and funny - everything the original was, but with extra filth.

Society painter Basil Hallward is now Baz, a smack-addled has-been of Eighties conceptual art. Sloaney Dorian jets around the globe infecting everyone he can with Aids while staying symptom-free himself.

And archaesthete Henry Wotton's tastes now unashamedly extend to shooting up and the occasional "conga line of buggery".

Self apes great, but in making Dorian's crimes so explicit, he loses much of his source's power to unsettle. His approach works best when it's closer to spoof than homage.

When he stops trying to keep his end up, Self does his hero proud.