Olivia Laing’s New Historical Fiction Sees Famed Italian Filmmakers Navigate Fascism

It is September of 1974. Italy is in turmoil, with the radical left and the fascist right warring in the thick of what will come to be called the Years of Lead. The great maestros Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini are preparing to film Casanova and Salò, respectively; the renowned costume and set designer Danilo Donati has been hired to work on both productions. Enter Nicholas Wade, a young Slade graduate who has fled to Venice following the sudden death of a former lover back in London. As he sits sketching the church of San Vidal, Nicholas is picked up by Danilo and, the morning after their first sexual encounter, becomes the designer’s lover and apprentice. Nicholas is both preternaturally beautiful and preternaturally porous: “He’s better than a camera,” Danilo observes, “much more observant. Much more useful.”

So begins Olivia Laing’s Silver Book, which takes place in this fraught historical moment. Yet The Silver Book does not precisely feel like a historical, or historicized, novel. Laing’s prose is vignetted and elliptical, relying on details rather than exposition to suggest the text’s setting: hippies at a train station; Don’t Look Now playing at the movies. In Laing’s novel, as in life, the historical importance of an era is not explicitly referred to so much as felt. Here, Laing focuses on Nicholas and Danilo’s daily acts of living, largely creative tasks devoted to the fabulations of filmmaking: costuming, set fabrication, sketching. And yet, The Silver Book appears to argue, no matter how much illusion and fakery go into its making, an artist’s work is inseparable from the era that produces it.

At the heart of the novel is Danilo and Nicholas’s relationship, triangulated by their mutual devotion to art-making. From the outset, Laing’s text conjures a tight, sensual world. Nico, on his first night in Danilo’s hotel room in Venice, compares it to an underwater cavern: “[He] feels like a pearl, finely set.” Laing has a light touch with the third person narration, alternating between Dani and Nico’s points of view. Danilo—older, capable, settled in himself—is “immaculate” in Nicholas’s eyes, with a gift for creating costumes out of thin air, whereas Nico is talented but lost: “It’s like finding a red setter puppy on the side of the road,” Danilo thinks. Nicholas, penniless, disowned by his parents for being gay, and having abandoned his old life in London, needs Dani to survive; Dani needs Nico to have someone to care for.

Laing’s prose revels in the heated sensuality of their relationship: “He pulls down Nicholas’s jeans, lies him on the bed, plunges his face into his crotch, then rolls him over and opens him like a peach.” Laing’s background as an arts writer, and their clear love of visual art, comes through in the language of beauty and pleasure that suffuses The Silver Book. A dead hare, the centerpiece of a New Year’s stew, brings to mind a Dutch still life. Danilo muses that Nicholas “looks like a Renaissance angel, though obviously English.” The text is unabashedly queer and unapologetically erotic, a delight to read.

Though Laing’s prose is sexual, it is rarely explicit; rather, they have a gift for capturing the subtle fluctuations of yearning and desire. After an initially judgmental Nicholas discovers cruising, he has an encounter with two boys at the Colosseum. “It is too much, it is so much too much that it is as if he has burst the bounds of his own skin,” Laing writes. The next morning, when Nicholas reports the encounter to Danilo, the man replies: “Okay greedy boy,” then sends him out to do the grocery shopping. When Nicholas becomes drawn to Pasolini, the handsome doomed director around which the latter half of the book orbits, the appeal is “not attraction, exactly, it’s more like the shift in pressure that would occur if a volcano was compressed and compressed again until it was the size of a stone.”

BASED ON THE Marquis de Sade’s novel 120 Days of Sodom, which centers on the debauched and sadistic acts of four aging, power-hungry “libertines,” Pasolini’s Salò transposes de Sade’s text of sexual violence and torture to the Republic of Salò, the puppet state created by Nazi Germany in 1943, and the final stage of Mussolini’s fascist Italy. Pasolini’s film is an indictment of power unchecked and the cruelty that results, or as Nicholas puts it, “the four libertines are fascists engaged in a last orgy of terror as the country slides from their control.” As Pasolini, imagined by Laing, describes it, the Republic of Salò was “a new republic of unparalleled viciousness and cruelty.” It’s also an era that, though Nicholas knows nothing about it, both Pasolini and Danilo lived through. “Salò is a location on a map,” Laing’s Pasolini continues, “a moment in time, a state of mind, coming and going, perhaps even now approaching in the rear-view mirror.” The film was, crucially, intended as a warning—a sign for Italy to take notice of the fascism brewing in the country once more.

Laing first came to prominence with their nonfiction book The Lonely City, which sets the biographies of eight artists against Laing’s philosophical and personal exploration of loneliness. Laing’s strength as a biographer and historian makes The Silver Book, their second novel, sing on a deeper level; their lush, beautiful prose is backed by meticulous research. The Silver Book is Laing’s first work of historical fiction, a genre that tells us about the present as much as it reveals about the past. In focusing on Pasolini’s Salò, itself a work that reckons with history, The Silver Book offers a kind of layered meta-historical fiction, form and content colliding. Laing’s depiction of Pasolini’s work sets out to draw our attention to the ceaseless and inexorable repetitions of history. In our own era of rising fascism, of increasing violence and conservatism, Laing’s novel feels eerily timely.

Salò was intended to be a political statement on a monumental scale, and Pasolini is the book’s ardent moral compass. Laing includes several direct quotations from the novelist-director’s interviews, in which he decried consumerism and spoke out against the system of capitalism: “We are all guilty, because we are all ready to play at slaughtering each other, as long as we are able to own everything at the end of the slaughter.” Yet Pasolini’s dire warnings go unheeded. In the novel, he’s depicted as a compelling iconoclast whose pronouncements are “calm, reasonable, apocalyptic.” Telling Nicholas about the publication of a Pasolini interview, which is “like a petrol bomb in paper form,” Danilo says: “It’s like a disease, he is compelled to speak the truth. And I am a coward and I am afraid of what the cost will be.”

IN FICTION, ONE USES fakery, construction, and artifice to tell a deeper truth; cinema does the same. Watching a horror film, we know intellectually that no blood has been spilled, yet in the darkened theater we still scream in fear. Behind the scenes, the making of Salò, “the sickest film of all time,” is a cheerful romp, a set full of half-naked teens snacking on potato chips. Through Danilo’s constructions—period gowns; ocean waves made of plastic; murals made from candy that find a sinister echo in glossy chocolate fake shit—Laing takes the reader through the fakery that composes the real. In cinema, everything is made from something else.

And yet, at the heart of the process lies something true: “Everyone else might be unaffected, mysteriously immune, but the daily descent into hell is getting to Nicholas,” Laing writes about his changing outlook during the filming of Salò. Unable to fully separate from the fictitious world of the film, Nicholas finds that fake violence is just as disturbing as real violence: “Things are becoming a bit too mixed.”

All the characters in the novel are, like Laing, making things. When Danilo first encounters Nicholas, the young man is drawing. Nico has just stepped off the train, and “he will have to find a place to stay,” Laing writes, “but first, the need is almost physical, he will find a place to sit and he will draw.” Laing understands this urge, the artist’s calling, the desire to interpret the world into something that can be held and beheld, a desire that borders on and mingles with the sexual. (Of a drawing Nicholas has made in the hope of impressing Dani: “The [angel]’s hand holds a spear that he’s thrusting lightly through the devil’s neck. Blood leaks out.”) When Danilo says that Nicholas is better than a camera, what he means is that there’s nothing more valuable than the human eye, nothing more important than a point of view, how one interprets the world. The Silver Book is about art’s tremendous power: It’s Nicholas’s drawings that first get the attention of Danilo; it’s the politics of his final film, Salò, that, as in real life, draws the attention of Pasolini’s killers. In November 1975, just three weeks before the movie was released, he was was brutally murdered on a beach in Ostia, Italy. His murder remains unsolved.

All art is a product of its time, whether it chooses to acknowledge the circumstances of its making or cover them up with distraction and fakery. In layering historical moments—Italy in 1975, the 1943 Republic of Salò—and resurfacing them in this current era as fascism again emerges, Laing impresses on the reader how history impresses itself on the present. It cannot be escaped; the violence of the Years of Lead is what Pasolini saw approaching in the rear-view mirror. Laing forces us to ask: What future are we driving toward?