Oscar's books.

Guardian Review

Some books end better than they start, and in so doing, may even earn themselves the right to be reread. This might well be one of them. It is only on his last page, after 40 chapters on Wilde's career as both a typical and untypical Dublin-born and Oxford-educated 19th-century reader, that Thomas Wright reveals, in a highly personal afterword, that he has spent 20 years attempting to complete the strange - indeed, devotional - task of tracking down and reading every single book that Oscar Wilde is known to have ever read or owned, preferably in the same editions and even, where possible, using Wilde's copies. All biography requires a degree of fascination with the subject, but this final admission gives the book a satisfyingly obsessive twist. Seduced at the age of 16 by second-hand copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray (for presciently Wildean reasons: "It was cheap, I liked the smell of its pages"), Wright instantly became a life-long fan. His adolescent infatuation was such that he even chose to go to Wilde's old college, Magdalen, primarily so as to be able to walk in his hero's footsteps. Then, after a trip to Naples to try to find the villa in which Wilde had staged his ill-fated final reunion with Bosie - a trip largely fuelled by the true fan's desire to discover some as-yet-undiscovered treasure-trove of relics, preferably in the form of the remnants of Wilde's post-Reading gaol library - this literary idolatry crystallised into an admirably perverse project: to turn all this rereading into a new book of his own. The result is this handsomely bound and illustrated new biography-cum-study of Wilde, which promises to measure out the life not by the familiar biographical landmarks, but by a chronological excavation of Wilde's life-long reading list. The premise of the book is gorgeous; what better and more intriguing way to get inside Wilde's mind and heart, devoted as he was to the concepts of influence and imitation (not to mention the practice of plagiarism), than through his reading ? Whether or not you find its working-out an entirely satisfying read will probably depend on how much of a Wilde fan you are yourself. Although the book is both thorough and informative, much of it is a bit less intriguing than the cover-blurb ("An entirely new kind of biography") sets it up to be. The sheer number of titles to be trawled through sometimes creates clutter rather than depth - and the afterword's disappointingly frank admission that Wright hasn't actually read all of the books he discusses not only accounts for some of the rather distant and approximate resumes of their contents, it also rather lets the steam out of the writing (I think I'd rather he had gone the whole Wildean hog, and just lied). In the early chapters especially, the repeated qualifiers that Wilde "may have read ", "doubtless read" or is "highly likely to have read" somewhat put a dampener on Wright's speculations as to the influences the books in question might have had. Where the writing really comes to life is where it gets personal. When he talks about handling copies owned or annotated by Wilde, his prose takes off, and forgets entirely to be either scholarly or dutiful. He is also particularly purple - and effectively so - when describing the rooms in which Wilde did his reading. His evocations of the young scholar perched on a window-ledge overlooking the Cherwell on the Kitchen Staircase in Magdalen, of the professional aesthete ensconced in the eccentrically decorated ground-floor library at No 16 Tite Street, and of the half-insane prisoner losing his eyesight in the gaslit gloom of Cell C33 in Reading gaol, are all robustly well done. And he's certainly done his homework - a constant play of allusion and half-quotation makes it clear that he has read not only almost every word written about Wilde, but certainly every word by him. He has good and useful (if mostly second-hand) things to say about how Wilde's books stand in relation to some of their usually overlooked Victorian neighbours on the library shelf - his parents' collections of appropriated Irish oral literature and fairytales; cheap popular fiction; homosexual pornography; undergraduate editions of the classics. In fact, if you're a devotee, then you'll find enough newly assembled information (and certainly enough enthusiasm) to make the book a useful addition to your Wilde library; and if you're a newcomer to the wonderful world of Wilde, and can't face either the length or the near-censoriousness of the now-official Ellmann biography - well, it's probably as good a 300-page introduction to the life, work and art as you could want to start with. One hundred and eight years after his demise (with his dying eyes fixed, in Wright's commendably lurid imagination, on a shelf of books), we still seem not to have run out of things to say about Wilde - and Wright's novel slant allows quite a few of them to be said again with both knowledge and flair. Neil Bartlett's production of An Ideal Husband is currently at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. To order Oscar's Books for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book services on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-wilde.1 He has good and useful (if mostly second-hand) things to say about how [Oscar Wilde]'s books stand in relation to some of their usually overlooked Victorian neighbours on the library shelf - his parents' collections of appropriated Irish oral literature and fairytales; cheap popular fiction; homosexual pornography; undergraduate editions of the classics. In fact, if you're a devotee, then you'll find enough newly assembled information (and certainly enough enthusiasm) to make the book a useful addition to your Wilde library; and if you're a newcomer to the wonderful world of Wilde, and can't face either the length or the near-censoriousness of the now-official Ellmann biography - well, it's probably as good a 300-page introduction to the life, work and art as you could want to start with. One hundred and eight years after his demise (with his dying eyes fixed, in [Thomas Wright]'s commendably lurid imagination, on a shelf of books), we still seem not to have run out of things to say about Wilde - and Wright's novel slant allows quite a few of them to be said again with both knowledge and flair. - Neil Bartlett.