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.
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.
Accomplished ... Feels like a precision-controlled environment. In taut sentences, Laing evokes the sensuous eroticism and incipient danger of a 1970s Italian setting, moving towards a shattering conclusion ... Rigorously researched and realised ... This is a better, richer novel than its predecessor.
Laing’s skill is to select details and put them into stronger focus ... What can the novelist offer that the biographer cannot? In Laing’s case, it is economy of words: a prose that pares down and transforms the messiness of the real into sentence after sentence of unforced lucidity. Descriptive writing can often seem laboured, but the author’s scene-setting is managed with deftness ... This is a gripping novel that is, in many ways, a technical tour de force. Few writers can sustain such pace while using the potentially static-feeling historic present tense ... A distilled take on reality that is ultimately an illusion, not simply because of the things it makes up, but because it irons out complexities in its pursuit of beauty.
