It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini's Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs. He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecittâa, the studio where Casanova's Venice will be ingeniously assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Saláo, Pasolini's horrifying fable of fascism. But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy's Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he doesn't intend.
Sublime ... The beating heart of The Silver Book is Nicholas and Donati’s love story. Laing affectingly renders this mentor-apprentice relationship, exploring the complexity of its vulnerabilities, jealousies and petty frustrations. But where the book really soars is in its visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking ... Given the extravagance of this world, it might have been tempting to use a maximalist style to match the material. Instead, Laing’s prose is taut and cleareyed, even at its most sensational.
That past haunts [the protagonist] at narratively convenient moments throughout the novel, but the mystery hinted at early on proves itself to be little more than a MacGuffin, a cinematic device used to move the plot along rather than unlock significant meaning ... Abrupt mood changes start to feel more tied to plot necessities than anything that took place in [the] previous scene ... Clearly well-researched and replete with details about Fellini, Pasolini, Donati, and the making of these films ... Things get a bit credulous, logistically and logically, when the historic theft of dozens of film reels gets shoehorned into the plot, but the novel’s biggest swing comes when its focus changes in the final act to a discussion of Italian politics.
Possesses a tangle of compelling themes ... The deft plotting in Laing’s novel keeps readers engaged in not only the personal lives of the characters, but also in the larger political questions the story persistently stirs up ... All in all, Laing’s novel is a beautiful, terrifying, wonderful work of fiction.
