One night in early November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the iconoclastic master of Italian neorealist cinema, was brutally murdered on a beach outside Rome. This horrifying – and to this day, unsolved – murder provides the crux of Olivia Laing’s new novel, The Silver Book, an imagining of true events in the year leading up to Pasolini’s death.
Most of the novel takes place on the sets of two films: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s controversial Sadean indictment of fascism; and Federico Fellini’s camp, bewitching biopic Casanova. The two great directors are made peripheral here, however, and Laing turns their focus instead on the films’ celebrated costume designer Danilo Donati, and the relationship with his fictionalised lover, Nicholas, a young art student from London, who has fled to Italy to elude a painful past.
Taking place in a period of Italy’s history when corruption and political violence were particularly rife, the love affair that ensues as Danilo brings Nicholas on set as “an apprentice” is relayed with a terse note of doom from the start. It’s an undeniably alluring premise, and the weaving of their affair with Laing’s rigorous research into the “dream factory” behind two of Italy’s most strange and thrilling works of cinema is fertile ground for a fascinating book.
It’s a shame then that, as a novel, it feels a little lacklustre. At times, the plot feels like a loose scaffold for Laing’s compendium of self-conscious historic signifiers, and the essayistic observations from the mouths of the characters sometimes feel like clunky ventriloquisms of Laing’s own retroactive perspective.
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In one such reflection, Danilo says: “Like the town of Salò itself, its presence in the film is a way of lashing de Sade’s fiction to Italy’s own past” – which sounds like something a critic might say of a film after it’s been released, not something a costume designer might speculate about a film that doesn’t exist yet.
Laing is a masterful essayist, always keenly attuned to queer art history’s most interesting figures, and The Silver Book is, ultimately, a timely exploration of the persistence of art under political duress – but it might have been a more satisfying book if Laing had chosen the form in which they most excel, the essay, instead.
