“Ugliness,” noted Pier Paolo Pasolini, “is never completely depressing or repulsive. It contains within it an allegory of hunger and pain, its history is our history, the history of Fascism … It is tragic, but immediate, and for this reason, full of life.” For Pasolini, ugliness was its own kind of truth, such that Rome could lay no claim to being the most beautiful city in the world “if it were not, at the same time, the ugliest”. For some, though, that truth risked becoming “unseeable”. The gaze of the touristic voyeur, said Pasolini, skimmed over slums for the poor “filled with illness, violence, crime, and prostitution”, “convinced of the extraneousness and untimeliness of this sub-proletarian, underdeveloped world”.
Olivia Laing’s second novel, The Silver Book, is a work preoccupied with beauty. Set in the world of Italian cinema in 1974, the book overflows with extravagant film sets, feasts, dazzling costumes. Even Pasolini himself, cruising around in his Alfa Romeo, oozes charisma and allure. But as Pasolini made clear, beauty without its opposite can only ever be incomplete.
The book opens at the peak of its art and intensity. For reasons initially withheld, Nicholas, the book’s callow protagonist, flees London for Italy. In Venice, he meets real-life set designer Danilo Donati, who takes him first as a lover and then as a paid assistant, whisking him off to the studio in Rome where Fellini is filming Casanova, then later to a remote villa, the setting for Pasolini’s notorious masterpiece of fascist brutality, Salò.
At its best, Laing’s writing is urgent and elegantly wrought. Fellini’s Casanova is described as “floating on a greasy tide of his own compulsions through the guttering century”. Pasolini has the physical presence of “a downed power line, whipping across tarmac until it melts the road”. Quickly, though, the technique that lends the novel its pace becomes a liability. Laing fashions canapes of prose: tight, present-tense paragraphs, each separated by a line break from the next. As the novel strains to take on more challenging material, these morsels of image and event begin to feel measly and insubstantial.
Working in constrained space, Laing compiles lists in place of living description. Memories are itemised rather than explored (“Wife’s perfume, car keys in his pocket, the job, the club, the parents, the bank accounts …”); hopeful actors lining up for a casting are reduced to a spreadsheet of physiognomy (“Pimpled foreheads, Adam’s apples, bedroom eyes, fine blonde hair”); landscape is rendered as finger painting (“Grey stone, green mountains, grey sky, green trees”). On the set of Salò, Danilo runs his hand over a collection of costumes, feeling “Cream damask. Crushed brown velvet. Black satin.” Just a page later, his memories of the war are rendered in precisely the same shorthand: “Denunciations, round-ups, missing people, deportations. The trucks, the trains.”
The trucks, the trains: this cursory, free-associative language is not how a person who experienced the war would recall it; it is how someone with only a very limited knowledge of the war would fail to imagine it. It is also precisely the point at which the deeper inadequacy of Laing’s taxonomic method is exposed. In this bullet-pointed world, the weight of one thing compared to another is erased. People become occurrences; events are disassembled into things. A stretch of fabric and the experience of deportation resonate at uniform pitch.
The Silver Book is a novel fatally undermined by all the things it invokes without daring to depict. Take, for example, Salò – in which Pasolini refashions the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom into a visceral postmortem of fascist violence. Reading the script, Nicholas “enters hell”. Filming is described as “the daily descent into hell”. The reader, though, is spared any such experience. Instead, Laing gives us Salò as dressmaker’s dream – an array of props and costumes cleansed of their power to shock.
“Most people, not Pasolini, are ruled by fear,” Laing asserts, pressing Pasolini into service as an avatar of political and creative courage. It’s an evasion, because much as The Silver Book might strike a revolutionary pose, it is a novel of class-bound conventionality – one that flirts again and again with transgression, only to back timidly away. Cruising – both a vital part of Pasolini’s life and the backdrop to his unsolved murder – is mentioned but never in any detail depicted. Fascism is alluded to but its victims and machinery remain invisible. Rome’s sub-proletarian world remains untimely and extraneous.
The clothes, the food, the glossy aesthetic, the spritz of radical chic, the gestures towards a political resistance stripped of all material context, the arrangement of aspirational icons, those floating squares of prose, scrolling frictionlessly by – there’s a reason this all feels familiar and easy to consume. The Silver Book is a novel distorted by the medium it has shaped itself to flatter: it is an Instagram feed bound between book covers. There can be no ugly, unseeable truth here; only the artful pose is of value.
In an afterword, Laing notes that though the truth of Pasolini’s murder remains opaque, looking for individuals to blame “risks missing the point of Pasolini’s warnings about a system in which we are all enmeshed, and which has only grown more powerful in the past half-century”. It’s the final move in The Silver Book’s evasive political dance. Laing has shown us nothing of this system or its workings, and nothing of our own culpability in its crimes. In showing us nothing, Laing has risked nothing, and so must invoke at every opportunity those who risked and lost everything. The result is a novel both self-protecting and superficial – hypnotised by beauty, safely distant from everything it hints at in hope of depth.