Olivia Laing photographed by Phil Fisk for the Nerve
After the mutilated body of Pier Paolo Pasolini was discovered on a beach near Rome on 2 November 1975, the consensus was that the 53-year-old director had been murdered while out on the prowl for sex. A 17-year-old hustler was duly convicted. “For a while even his gay film-making contemporaries would say: ‘Oh, it was inevitable. He was almost looking for his own death. It was just rough trade’,” says Olivia Laing, whose new novel is premised on the murder.
Fifty years on, nobody believes that to be true, though opinions vary as to whether his death was a simple case of blackmail gone wrong or something more deeply sinister. The Silver Book is neither a simple whodunnit, nor a traditional work of historical fiction, but a luminous evocation of the way of being, and thinking, that led to such dangerous territory.
Months before Pasolini’s death, in a raid on a storehouse belonging to the Italian studio Cinecittà, thieves had stolen reels of several films in-progress, including Pasolini’s Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom and Federico Fellini’s Casanova. Both would be major events, and were expected to be taboo-busting. But Pasolini’s film was the most directly confrontational, in its transportation of the obscenities of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century novel to the final days of Mussolini’s regime in the Republic of Salò, the fascist puppet state. In his parallel calling as a newspaper columnist, Pasolini had made it quite clear he did not think fascism was done and dusted, even hinting that he was writing a novel that would name names.
The ramifications of the mystery had been going round and round in Laing’s mind while trying to find a subject for a second novel. After publishing five well-received works of non-fiction and one auto-fictional novel, the multidisciplinary author had spent the pandemic bingeing on Pasolini films. The original intention was to include him in a work-in-progress, The Garden Against Time, because of the utopian ideas in his Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights). While deciding that he couldn’t comfortably be accommodated in a memoir-based meditation on the cultural history of gardening, Laing became fascinated by the surreal and luscious detail of the costume in the films. The trail led to the designer Danilo Donati, who turned out to have devised the wardrobes for both Salò and Casanova. The latter, for which he was also production designer, won him an Oscar.
The Italian film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Photo: Keystone/Getty
“I had this idea for a long time that I wanted to write a sort of Ripley/le Carré kind of thriller,” Laing explains. But it wasn’t until a trip to Venice, where the novel opens, that everything fell into place. “I was leaving the city in a water taxi. So I was out in the lagoon, and I had this vision of Donati meeting a beautiful, redheaded English boy outside a church, and this sort of an explosion happening between them – a love affair with terrible consequences. That would be a way for me to tell this larger story about Pasolini.”
At the time, Laing was committed to publishing and promoting The Garden Against Time. The delay proved unexpectedly fruitful, creating time to root out and squirrel away details about a man far less well known than the directors with whom he collaborated. “There would be documentaries about Fellini, and 40 minutes in Danilo would walk past in the background, and I'd be like: what coat is he wearing? What are his shoes like?” says Laing. “I have this feeling now that I start books too early, because there was something so brilliant about just having to hold it in my head for a year.” When they finally sat down to write, the novel poured out in under three months. “It was like I had tuned to a frequency, and I could hear something. I just had to type as fast as I physically could. It was very, very strange.”
The redheaded boy is Daniel, a gifted artist, who has fled England for reasons which keep shifting through the novel as his character and history emerge from an evocation of mid-20th-century life and film-making that is both voluptuous and punctiliously detailed. Laing, who is non-binary and was born two years after Pasolini died, has an uncanny ability to convey the most intimate realities of gay life at the time, while also underscoring a propulsive plot with a demonstration of why outsider sensibilities, such as those of Pasolini and Donati, are so important.
Like the characters of their novel, Laing is also something of an outsider figure who has flouted publishing lore about building a consistent body of work, with books about rivers and Virginia Woolf’s suicide (To the River), writers and alcoholism (The Trip to Echo Spring), and the Marxist analyst who some believe invented the sexual revolution, Wilhelm Reich (Everybody: A Book About Freedom). Their debut work of fiction, Crudo, was a wacky experimental dialogue with the American author and artist Kathy Acker.
The sensibility of The Silver Book is deeply queer in its celebration of non-conformism, its appreciation of perfectly veneered surfaces, and its understanding of the penalties paid for such a lifestyle in terms of guilt and secrecy. Laing knows exactly what that feels like, having grown up with one sister in a lesbian family during the Aids crisis. “So basically, my entire childhood, apart from the bit that you don't remember so much, was in a gay family. It was clear to us from very small childhood that [my mum and her partner] were in a relationship, but there were these dense layers of secrecy.” They were forced to leave their convent primary school, and move to another part of the country, after the family was dramatically outed by an au pair to all the parents and the nuns at the convent.
Laing later turned down a place at Cambridge “because I thought it wasn't political enough”, won a place at Sussex University, and then dropped out “to live on road protests”, which at one point involved shacking up in a treehouse. “I had a really wild life in activism, and then as a herbalist, which was actually a very good experience in terms of getting people to tell you about really personal things and thinking about the body as this sort of centre point between people's personal lives and their political or social lives.”
‘It felt like the kind of nonfiction that I was writing couldn't do justice to the degradation of truth, the rapidity of events, the strangeness of the world’
After a brief spell as a literary journalist on the Observer, they found themselves having to improvise again, and the result was a book proposal for what would become To the River. It was while in the US, researching their second book, The Trip to Echo Spring, that they started to come to terms with their non-binary identity and discovered a new queer community. “This was right at the beginning of that whole language being developed. It's hard to remember how recent all of that was,” they say.
The characters in Laing’s third book, The Lonely City, which came out of that period, ranged from Edward Hopper to Greta Garbo. It linked the corset that held Warhol’s bullet-punctured torso together with David Wojnarowicz’s famous self-portrait from the Aids crisis with his lips stitched shut. “No one had quite put that cast of people together, and that felt really thrilling,” says Laing. “I realised that I'd got hold of this taboo thing that people didn't like saying, and that there was this sort of shadow city to explore that hadn't been quite put into language.” It also involved a broadening of subject matter from writers to artists. “That was the big thing about that book: I suddenly felt like I'd found my material.”
Olivia Laing photographed by Phil Fisk for the Nerve
Laing now lives in a cottage in Suffolk and a studio flat in London’s Barbican Centre with Ian Patterson – also a writer – whom they met through friends and befriended on social media: “We were both the only people we knew who liked gardens.” They became close after the death of his wife, Jenny Diski, and married in 2017. “It isn't a heterosexual relationship because I’m trans, which, to his massive credit, he seems absolutely unbothered by,” they say. “He's not brilliant on pronouns, but he is very brilliant at grasping who I am and being unflustered by it. I've got a lot of gay and trans friends, and that's a world that he's very at ease in.”
It is not a coincidence that Laing’s move into fiction comes at a time when all the hard-won advances in liberty and language are being pushed back. “It felt like the kind of non-fiction that I was writing couldn't do justice to the degradation of truth, the rapidity of events, the strangeness of the world. I couldn't possibly have that kind of cruel, calm, almost 20th-century voice, because it didn't do justice to what was happening,” they say.
Asked for examples, they cite Kemi Badenoch pledging at the most recent Tory conference to “drive down rip-off degrees” such as English literature, psychology and anthropology, and the relentless campaign internationally against the human rights of those who are judged to be of the wrong race or gender. “All this has to be fought: that people like JK Rowling are pouring their money and their clout into creating this kind of division when there's so much violence against women. It's inexplicable to me that she hasn't focused on rape convictions or domestic violence. Why give £70,000 pounds to stopping trans kids being able to use the bathroom at school? What a grotesque hill to die on.”
To go back in this context and look at the things Pasolini was saying, and the films he was making, is to see a real prophecy and a warning, Laing believes. “It feels to me as if Pasolini saw the first stirrings of the evil flower that's coming into bloom right now. It's not just fascism. He's so interesting about this. He said that when fascism comes back, it's not going to look like it looked like in the second world war. It's going to be capitalism and the far right merging. It's this sort of endgame of capitalism. And I think he saw that before anybody else saw it. He gave warnings about that, and I think he was killed for it. And it isn't just the dangers of fascism. The warning encapsulated in Salò is that compliance and complicity are the dangers facing sleepwalking victims. That's us.”
The counterpoint offered by Laing’s novel is to show people living, working and loving in a world of their own making. “It’s the flip side of the illusions of film-making,” says Laing, “... this belief that building communities of resistance and creativity is something that's sustaining, and that art can really be that thing.”
The Silver Book is published by Hamish Hamilton. Olivia Laing is in conversation with Neil Bartlett at Foyles in Charing Cross on 12 November