THE SILVER BOOK

Erotic romance, moviemaking audacity, and looming dread co-exist in this arresting fact-based novel set in Italy’s hazardous 1970s.

In the autumn of 1974, Nicholas Wade, a 22-year-old art student, needs to bolt his London digs hurriedly enough to ensure that he can be safely removed from “possible questions, speculation.” (About what isn’t said.) Nicholas crosses the English Channel and ends up in Venice, where he arouses the erotic interest of Danilo Donati, the celebrated costumer and production designer best known for his work with superstar directors Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. As it happens, Danilo is now working with both these eccentric and willful filmmakers on separate but equally incendiary projects: Fellini’s opulent biopic of Casanova and Pasolini’s graphic account of fascist sadism during World War II, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Almost immediately after taking Nicholas as a lover, Danilo designates him as “my apprentice” and together they head for Rome and the fabled Cinecittà studios, where Nicholas meets the volatile, luminous Fellini and wins over the maestro and veteran craft workers with his drawings and designs. When the Casanova project stalls, Nicholas and Danilo travel to Mantua where Pasolini is working on Salò. In contrast with the boisterous, effusive Fellini, the way Pasolini speaks “is hypnotic: both his soft, whispery voice and the apocalyptic things he says.” One could say similar things about the spectral mood and tone pervading Laing’s novel, rife with sensuality, illuminating archival details about the Italian film industry, and disquieting intimations about the growing social and political unrest that in only a few years would grow in terror and bloodshed, forever marking the decade as the country’s Years of Lead. Pasolini’s brutal murder, the climactic tragedy that closes this saga, may well have been the first manifestation of such “lead,” though Laing’s command of suggestion and subtlety allows readers to make their own inferences.

A mesmerizing, contemplative, and haunting work of historical fiction.