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WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to
in that respect. I think people who do understand, really
understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t
understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am
more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at
writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment.
CH: What about the other novel you were writing on
‘land use’?
WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth.
No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a
rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on
revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m
engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going
to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writing
for about three years back into a novel.
So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde,
which is something I would have never done off my
own back, but having been commissioned to write a
screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that
it will never get made, I wanted to make something out
of the material I already had.
I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s
and 90s, into the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic and
I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make
an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next
fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is
that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for
this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an
BUY Will Self books online from and
incredibly powerful cultural idea.
Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to
time, so the text itself has been impervious to time because
in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you
know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able
to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold
the probable shape of a kind of aggressively ‘out’ gay
culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fascinating
about Dorian and the way in which gay culture
in the late 20th century has become a synecdoche of the
narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a
novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today.
CH: So it’s nearing completion?
WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some
time next year, but when I really get my teeth into
something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It
just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich
Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into
prose and I’ve got a book hopefully.
CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers
regarding adaptations of your stories?
WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And
Bull, which he wanted to push commercially, but after
seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth,
I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go
ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already
having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has
also been optioned for film twice by the producer Chris-
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