“I thought Salò was about the war, Nicholas says. You both told me that. You laughed at me because I didn’t know what it was. Oh boy. Dani strikes his own leg, just lightly. Not really. No. It’s about now. It’s all about now.” The Silver Book by Olivia Laing is breathtakingly good. Both a queer love story and a journey into the world of Italian film making in the 1970’s. Nicholas, a young artist is fleeing something terrible that he feels responsible for in London. He runs to Venice to escape and draw. Danilo, who is there to research the city to recreate it for Fellini’s Casanova, picks up Nicholas, sets him to work drawing the piombi and other corners of Venice as they start an affair that continues when they move back to Rome. The novel takes us inside cinecittà and the meticulous creation of an illusory Venice for Fellini’s Casanova. When funding for the film is pulled for the film, Danilo starts working (with Nicholas as assistant), on Salò, Pasolini’s dark film which fuses the fascism of the Second World War with Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Olivia Laing succeeds in bringing this period vividly to life, with the disturbing undertow of fascism still lurking in Italy with elements determined to discredit and destroy Pasolini. Danilo and Nicholas are both fascinating characters whose age and life experience separates them even as they grow close. The novel managed to entwine the fictional characters with the real life happenings in a moving and thought provoking way. She brilliantly evokes the 1970s while making the novel feel deeply relevant to today

If you enjoy the films of Fellini and Pasolini, you will find the insights and stories in this novel hugely enjoyable. If you know nothing of the films of Fellini and Pasolini (as I do), you will find this novel illuminating and captivating. This is the story of Nicholas, a young art student in London, who flees, panic stricken after a breakup with his lover, to Rome where he is picked up by Danilo Donati, a top costume designer, working at Cinecittà, the Italian Hollywood. The time is 1974 and soon Nicholas is assisting Danilo at work and in his bed. We’re with them as work is planned and made for Fellini’s ‘Casanova’ and Pasolini’s ‘Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom’. This novel is plot-lite in that it reads more like a piece of creative non-fiction rather than as a typical novel with character arcs and plot points. This doesn’t detract from its readability and this book is not without incident. Nico and Danilo have their relationship ups and downs and there is intrigue about missing rolls of film. The author has an innovative way of writing that can be challenging but is always readable. Dialogue is almost always without quotation marks and is embedded with paragraphs. Sometimes the point-of-view changes within a paragraph so you have to work hard to know who’s speaking. However once you have become accustomed to this, the story does flow and begins to take on the quality of a stream-of-consciousness. If you have an interest in Italian cinema of the 1970s or indeed, an interest in how cinema is made, then this novel is well worth considering. It’s a lighter read than might be expected but with some big issues around the politics of the time thrown in.