“It meant I can carry on doing strange things,” Olivia Laing tells me from their home in Suffolk. “I’ll probably be allowed to carry on writing these quite weird books for a while longer.” They are talking about winning a Windham-Campbell Prize a few years ago, worth $175,000: a lifeline to any writer.
“Strange things” is one way of putting it. Laing is best known for genre-defying books that blend memoir, essay, history and biography. Among the best known are The Lonely City (2016), about artists whose work is permeated with loneliness, and The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), about writers with a fondness for the bottle.
Yet Laing is a creature of habit, perhaps embodying Gustave Flaubert’s direction that a writer should “be settled and orderly in your life, in order that you may be wild and original in your work.” (At the start of our conversation, they realise they haven’t had their regular 10.30am cup of coffee. “Oh my God! I knew there was something wrong with today.”)
Laing is nonbinary. They say, “I’ve always been a nonbinary person. I’ve been public about it for years, since first talking about it in The Lonely City. There’s been a lot of helpful increase in visibility and language. But the reason I decided to switch pronouns was after the supreme court verdict in Scotland this year [where the court ruled that, for the purposes of the UK Equality Act, the word “woman” referred to biological sex only].
RM Block
“And it felt very important to me to make it clear – as I have a level of visibility in the culture – that I’m a trans person in public life. Lots of people don’t fit into the so-called common sense categories of male and female, which are actually culturally constructed and powerfully policed. In all my work, I’m interested in fluidity, complexity, ambivalence, and that’s true politically and socially too.”
This fluidity, as Laing says, runs through their work. Although best known for the non-fiction books already mentioned, they also wrote a novel Crudo (2018), which took a similarly hybrid approach, appropriating elements from Laing’s own life, the writer Kathy Acker’s life, and current affairs during the time the book was being written. “I didn’t make anything up,” Laing says.
So we might be surprised that Laing’s new book – the purpose of our discussion today – is a more traditional novel. And so it is: up to a point.
The Silver Book springs from historical fact. In autumn 1974, two celebrated Italian filmmakers were in the process of making two of their best known movies: Federico Fellini with Casanova, and Pier Paolo Pasolini with Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, his controversial adaptation of the novel by the Marquis de Sade.
Also present is Danilo Donati, the real-life “magician of Italian cinema,” a designer who won two Oscars for best costume design (including for Fellini’s Casanova) and collaborated with both filmmakers. The shimmery silver cover of the novel shows Fellini and Donati in a water taxi, “probably in Venice on the way to the film festival”, says Laing, and looking tense. “They’ve just had a huge fight,” says Laing. “And there’s something about it that really captured the energy of a lot of the dynamic between Fellini and Donati in the book.”
But you don’t need to know anything about Donati, Fellini or Pasolini – as I didn’t – to get the most out of The Silver Book. “The book should work as if they’re fictional characters,” says Laing. Helping with this is one real fictional character, Nicholas, a young English artist who has fled his life in London – “He is 22 and has already obliterated the first of his lives”, we’re told – and he’s our eyes for much of the story, an innocent literally abroad.
What drew Laing to these filmmakers? “I was watching a lot of both of them during lockdown, but especially Pasolini. I’d had this idea years ago that I’d put Pasolini in [my previous book] The Garden against Time – but he didn’t fit. That often happens with books, that somebody doesn’t fit in. But I was still really interested [in him].”
Pasolini would not be surprised by the rash of flags appearing across British cities or the mobs of far right outside refugee hotels
— Laing
The story features film-making, costume design, acting and the creation of film sets – all aspects of representations of reality, how they coexist, complement and contradict one another. At one point, Nicholas asks Donati why they can’t film Casanova in Venice. “Because the film is not set in Venice,” he’s told. “It’s set in Fellini’s Venice, and that has to be made from scratch.”
Laing says: “It’s a book about dangerous illusions, fertile illusions, nourishing illusions, lethal illusions. Donati is this consummate illusion maker. I thought of him almost as a Renaissance figure, a master artist who’s in service to these prince-like figures, Fellini and Pasolini.
“I wanted to show that very rich world of hand-based creativity, as we enter our own bleak era of AI and machine creativity to really celebrate and serve – especially for young readers – as an invitation into the handmade, the hand-created.”
But there is another layer of illusion in The Silver Book, as Laing points out. “Pasolini is making films and writing novels and poetry, but he’s also writing journalism that’s attempting to tear the veil of illusion in Italian society and reveal the ongoing danger of fascism and the far right. I really started to see Pasolini as this prophet.”
Some of Pasolini’s journalism on the subject is presented in the book. “Fascism never really went away,” he says. “It just changed form, went underground, periodically exploding back into the daylight.”
“In a way, he predicted Berlusconi and Berlusconi predicted Trump,” says Laing. “Pasolini would not be surprised by the rash of flags appearing across British cities. He wouldn’t be surprised by the mobs of far right outside refugee hotels – those are exactly the sort of things he foresaw.”
And what Pasolini’s vocal political warnings lead to is the violent climax of the book – which on the one hand is part of the public record of his life, but on the other remains a shocking moment in the novel, because it ends a work of such atmospheric beauty, with a serenity and rhythm to the prose. It makes the book into a sort of thriller, which, says Laing, “is something I’ve been thinking about writing for a really, really long time.”
On top of all this there is a seam of comedy through the book also – Laing seems pleased when I mention this – such as the discussion of how best to make a cinematic turd for Salò’s more scatological scenes. Swiss chocolate? “Melts under the lights,” observes one character. Olive oil or marmalade to bind it? “This is the most disgusting conversation I’ve ever heard,” declares Nicholas. “We’re not perverts,” Donati tells him, “we’re labourers in the dream factory!”
“There’s a lot of teasing of each other,” Laing says. “I was spending a lot of time in Italy, and that felt very true to the Italian ways of working as well. They’re not as strait-laced as the English.”
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the book – with its balance and poise, its beauty and just-so language – is that it was written so quickly. “It was like taking dictation,” Laing says. “I could hear the book and just typed it out.” This was in the context of their having thought about the book for almost a year before beginning to write it. “I didn’t feel like I was looking for the right word. It was like I couldn’t physically type fast enough to get it down.
“If it had been my first book, I would have thought writing was the best game in the world. [But] it’s not going to happen again, which I’m devastated about! Creativity is so strange, even to the person who does it.”
Does writing get easier, then, in general? “No, it gets harder. There’s nothing like writing your first book, because you don’t believe anyone is going to read it. So you have this fabulous privacy [and] this very exciting sense of ‘No one is going to stop me’.”
It may be this sense that spurred Laing’s nonconforming books, aided later by the Windham-Campbell Prize. How did it feel to win? “It was completely crazy. It felt like the most immense affirmation of what I’ve been doing. ‘Somebody’s noticed, somebody’s reading them.’
“It’s the idea of having a prize that isn’t tied to a book, it’s tied to a body of work. That’s very different to what the literary culture is so invested in, which is finding the next big thing. Like Anne Enright getting it [this year] was such a fantastic thing. There’s somebody who’s made a body of work.”
And for Laing’s own work? One reason for writing The Silver Book, their second novel, was because “I felt that I had come to the limits of what I could do with nonfiction.”
When they say “come to the limits”, is that for this subject, or more generally? “I don’t know,” Laing says. “Potentially, I’ve come to the end of nonfiction. Fiction feels like an open door in a way that nonfiction feels like a closed door right now.
“I haven’t said that to anyone else,” they conclude. “That’s between you and me and The Irish Times.”
