Behind the facade

Set in the mid-1970s on Italian film sets, Olivia Laing's complex literary thriller holds contemporary resonances.

- JOSIE SHAPIRO

'There's no such thing as the past,” film director Pier Paolo Pasolini is quoted as saying in The Silver Book, an ambitious “queer, noirish” thriller by British writer Olivia Laing. Laing, the author of eight books, including Everybody: A Book about Freedom and the award-winning novel Crudo, locates this new work in 1975 on the Italian film sets of Federico Fellini's Casanova and Pasolini’s Salò, or, as it’s sometimes known, Pasolini’s 120 Days of Sodom.

The Silver Book remodels true events into fiction through the eyes of English art student Nicholas, who flees London in late 1974 under a cloud of guilt. He travels to Italy alone, hoping Venice will be the place he will “dissolve completely... emerge changed, or not emerge at all”. Only he meets Danilo Donati, costume designer for both Fellini and Pasolini, and they bond over their “shared lot, to carry around the burden of other people's hatred”. Nicholas can feel this Italian love affair creating a split in him, the past Nicholas and the present coexisting within his body: “At night... he lies awake with one hand on his belly, and feels the crack running through him, like a thing he can touch. He's two people, that’s who he is. One is a happy boy, stretched out against Danilo's back. The other is despicable; empty of substance.”