Olivia Laing's second novel, The Silver Book, transports readers to the glamorous yet politically charged world of 1970s Italian cinema, but ultimately delivers more style than substance according to critics.
A World of Contrasts: Beauty and Ugliness
The novel opens with protagonist Nicholas fleeing London for Italy in 1974, where he encounters real-life figures including set designer Danilo Donati. The narrative follows Nicholas as he becomes Donati's lover and assistant, working on Federico Fellini's Casanova and later on Pier Paolo Pasolini's controversial masterpiece Salò.
Pier Paolo Pasolini's philosophy of beauty and ugliness serves as a central theme throughout the work. The Italian filmmaker believed that ugliness contained its own truth, arguing that Rome could only claim to be the world's most beautiful city if it simultaneously acknowledged being the ugliest.
Stylistic Strengths and Weaknesses
At its best, Laing's prose demonstrates urgency and elegance. She describes Fellini's Casanova as "floating on a greasy tide of his own compulsions through the guttering century" and captures Pasolini's physical presence as resembling "a downed power line, whipping across tarmac until it melts the road."
However, the novel's distinctive structure - composed of brief, present-tense paragraphs separated by line breaks - becomes problematic as the story progresses. This technique creates a fragmented narrative that struggles to handle the weightier themes it attempts to address.
Laing frequently resorts to lists in place of detailed description, reducing complex experiences to bullet-pointed items. Memories become catalogues rather than explored emotions, landscapes are rendered as simple colour palettes, and even the trauma of war is presented in the same shorthand as fabric samples.
Missed Opportunities and Evasions
The novel's treatment of Pasolini's Salò proves particularly revealing of its limitations. While characters describe reading the script as "entering hell" and filming as "the daily descent into hell," readers are spared any genuine engagement with the film's disturbing content.
Laing transforms Salò into a dressmaker's fantasy, focusing on costumes and props while cleansing them of their power to shock or provoke. This approach exemplifies the novel's tendency to flirt with transgression while ultimately retreating to safer ground.
Cruising - both a vital part of Pasolini's life and the context of his unsolved murder - receives mention but no substantive exploration. Similarly, fascism is alluded to without depicting its victims or mechanisms, and Rome's sub-proletarian world remains peripheral despite Pasolini's insistence on its importance.
The Instagram Aesthetic in Literature
Critics suggest The Silver Book resembles an Instagram feed bound between covers - all curated aesthetics without substantive engagement with difficult truths. The novel offers beautiful surfaces: exquisite clothes, lavish feasts, glamorous film sets, and radical chic gestures, but avoids the messy, unphotogenic realities that give beauty its meaning.
In her afterword, Laing acknowledges the ongoing mystery surrounding Pasolini's murder while suggesting that focusing on individual culprits misses his broader warnings about systemic complicity. However, reviewers note that having shown readers nothing of this system or their own potential culpability, this final statement feels like another evasion.
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing is published by Hamish Hamilton and available for £20. While the novel successfully captures the glossy surface of 1970s Italian cinema, it ultimately remains safely distant from the difficult truths it gestures toward, creating a work that is both self-protecting and superficial.
