The first attempt at reading a book left me filling very meh. This book is great and reads very fast. It is the story of Dorian Gray, who is an extremely beautiful man. Man being a bit of a stretch, since the story picks up when Dorian is seventeen. He becomes friends first with Basil Hallward and through him friends with Lord Henry. These two are considerably older than Dorian, but Basil does not hide his obsession and fascination with the young Dorian, he is his muse and as a painter, he paints his masterpiece which of course is a portrait of Dorian. Upon its completion, Basil looks at Dorian and exclaims this portrait will always be a reminder of your perfect youth, every day you will grow older, but this protrait will forever be a reminder of what you were.
There is no magic spell or incantation, but Dorian gets very upset and staring at the portrait, he declares that he would rather the portrait age and he retain the beauty of youth. For this, he declares "I would give my soul away for that". It is not described in the story, but maybe Lord Henry is the devil, as he is a most interesting person with a very perverse sense of how he sees the world. Either way, the stage is set, and Dorian goes through 20 plus years and his looks retain the grace and beauty of a boy of nineteen. I say maybe Lord Henry is the devil because he stays best friends with Dorian though his whole life, and even as every other person he knows abandons him, Lord Henry seems unbothered and still finds him charming and beautiful.
At a certain point, he falls in love with a girl who acts on a stage, Sybil Vane, but she gets affected by love, and loses her zeal for the stage. Dorian invites his two friends because he is so proud of her genuinely great acting, but when they go to see her perform, she does horribly because she doesn't care about her craft, for she is in love. Dorian gets mad at her and states that instead of being a genius on the stage, she was shallow and stupid. He leaves her and in the next day finds she has killed herself. At this point, the painting has been hanging in his room, and he notices for the first time that the portrait has changed, the face has a visible smirk. He goes through some guilt and decides that it is best to hide the portrait so it is never seen. It is put in a room hid from everyone, and there it stays. He continues on through his mid-40s, still looking boyishly charming. But every sin scars the portrait more and more. At a certain point he kills a friend and the picture gets a bloody red tinge. I don't want to ruin the end, but it is definitely worth the read.
The story is short, at around 220 pages, and the language used by Lord Henry just flows and itself is very amusing.
"The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or
something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.
How perfectly hideous they are! Except of course in the church. But then in
the church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what
he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence
he always looks absolutely delightful."
My only problem was reading the prologue which mentioned drug use and Dorian going to houses of ill repute, but most of this is brushed off. He goes to an opium den, but the details are very sketchy. There have been several rewrites and possibly it was cleaned up in the version we see today. Back in the day, the author spent time in prison because the story was so morally reprehensible.
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