#18 The Confessions of Dorian Gray: This World Our Hell

Beyond The Dalek Contract and The Final Phase is another visit to the Randomoid Selectortron...

The Confessions of Dorian Gray: This World Our Hell

Starring: Alexander Vlahos as Dorian Gray
Format: one downloadable episode of half-CD length
Silly? Not overtly, but the entire premise is arguably an extended shaggy dog story to set up a punchline which, while never stated directly, may be obvious to listeners familiar with the real-world events.
Standalone? Yes. Some version of the events of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray happened in the past of this audio, but those events are substantially different from what the novel describes as it exists in the real world. Reading the actual novel does not enhance This World Our Hell.
Recommended? Yes, regardless of whether you have any interest in the novel.

My reactions to this story include spoilers for it and for the 1890 Oscar Wilde novel.

Before listening

There is one thing I remember very distinctly about this story: it is unambiguously meant to be a dark secret history behind Oscar Wilde's famous deathbed pronouncement "Either the wallpaper goes, or I do." We never hear that line spoken, but the plot concerns the exorcism of a demon living in the wallpaper of the hotel room in which Wilde lays dying.
In the world of this audio series, Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was about actual events involving his friend Dorian Gray, who remains eternally young and untouched by conscience as his portrait ages. However, Dorian dies in the novel only because Wilde invented for the novel an ending he felt was artistically correct. In fact, Gray has simply continued to live on, unchanged, and here he visits Wilde as Wilde is dying. Wilde still considers him a personal friend to some degree.
I have heard this story at least twice and enjoyed it. I remember one brief, ambiguously described scene I didn't understand either time, and I suspect this is either because I never read the original novel or because it is setting up an explanation later in the series. (I have not heard many episodes of this series.)
I am looking forward to relistening. I might skim through The Picture of Dorian Gray first for additional context this time around.

After reading The Picture of Dorian Gray

I did decide to read the novel, in case it gave additional context. Given a choice of two versions easily available online, I took the earlier, shorter one, as serialized in magazines in 1890.
One major observation: Wilde was basically an antisemite. I could have taken one instance as a stock character he used in an unexamined way, and I could have taken a second instance as the narrator reflecting the mind of the character, but I looked up other people's thoughts on the topic and found that The Picture of Dorian Gray is not the only Wilde work with antisemitic elements.
I also looked up version differences. Apparently the version Wilde submitted to the magazine had the most homosexual content, the version I read reduced that content by cutting a few lines, and the extended version Wilde published in book form also had less, as Wilde more or less desexualized the painter's interest in Dorian. Wilde possibly decided that the painter should interact with the world only on an abstract, artistic level.
The preface of the 1891 version rings false to me, and indeed seems to contradict the text of the book to a significant degree. Art, as depicted in the book, is something that can serve many distinct purposes, including both concealing and revealing reality, and some of these purposes have a moral element despite Wilde's protestation. It is possible that he uses the word "moral" in the preface in some Victorian-era way that doesn't match my own use of the term, though.
Every single main character in the book is an aristocrat with no real sense of compassion, so I can see why the British aristocracy would not have liked this book. On the other hand, we are expected to care about what these characters feel and at times sympathize with them despite their decadence. The effect of sin in the book is described almost entirely in terms of the effect it has on the sinner; the fact that a crime in many cases has an actual victim who suffers is a side note. This is definitely a mind-of-the-character element, but the narrator despite third person omniscience does not step outside it.
The concept of confession is important to the book, presumably informing the title of the Big Finish series, although I don't recall what I've heard of the audio series actually being framed in the form of confessions.
The nature of most of Dorian's sins is entirely unspecified, but at no point does he premeditate a direct murder more than a few moments in advance, and the prospect of personally killing someone does not seem to please him aesthetically. If audio Dorian is the same in this regard, then the ambiguous scene of the audio is Dorian engaging in some sort of debauchery, not Dorian killing someone, and the ambiguity of that debauchery follows the ambiguity of the original novel.
I don't imagine Dorian's voice in the novel sounding like Alexander Vlahos plays him; from what the novel says about his charm, I would expect his voice to be more like that of a teenager and to have less boredom in it. It is conceivable that only his visual appearance is unchanging and not his voice, but that doesn't seem to match the way other characters react to him.
I think reading the novel was a good idea, though I'm surprised its antisemitism doesn't come up more. I am now wondering at what point in the book the audio series diverges from the novel, and I am hoping I'll pick up on it when I listen to the episode.

After reading

This World Our Hell is narrated in the first person by Dorian Gray, far enough in the future from its events that he expects the audience not to know what the year 1900 was like. It is unclear who he is narrating to, if anyone, but the phrasing suggests written communication rather than casual conversation. The narration mostly provides linkage between full-cast scenes.
The Confessions of Dorian Gray seems to be based more on a pop-culture distillation of the novel than on the actual novel. Wilde calls Gray "the boy without a soul" and Gray is aware of his soul as something literal that he has sold to some entity in exchange for the painting. Gray fears the possibility that he has incurred a debt which some supernatural being might some day collect. His lack of a soul even functions as a sort of superpower when in conflict with the supernatural. This is very different from the novel, in which Dorian never did anything resembling a "sale" and the concept of the soul only appeared in a psychological, not supernatural, context.
There is another, possibly less obvious, difference from the novel. People believe Dorian Gray to be just a fictional character invented by Wilde, but in a world where Gray is real as presented in the book, this doesn't make sense: Gray was the talk of London high society for many years! For this to work, either something has supernaturally clouded the memories of London aristocracy or Dorian was talked about much less than the novel describes.
This World Our Hell establishes that Wilde invented the novel's ending, in which Dorian destroyed the painting and aged to death, but doesn't say anything at all about these other discrepancies between the audio and the real-world novel. I believe writer David Llewellyn and showrunner Scott Handcock expected the listener not to have the specific details of the novel fresh in mind.
The ambiguous scene I had mentioned earlier is a single long line narrated by Dorian: "And what happened next, in the shadows around the unfinished basilica, well let's just say, even on sacred ground, one's appetites can always be satisfied by the generosity of strangers." It is no less ambiguous having heard the novel, and given the audio's divergences from the novel, I still can't rule out the possibility that it refers to a murder. Maybe later episodes clear it up.
The fact that This World Our Hell seems to quietly disregard or rewrite elements of the novel diminishes my opinion of it somewhat, but it is still entertaining and atmospheric and I still recommend it to anyone who'd be inclined to hear any Big Finish audio.