The Power of Illusion: Olivia Laing on Creating a Thriller Inspired by 1970s Italian Cinema

I had wanted to write a thriller for a long time. A thriller like The Talented Mr Ripley or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, about illusion and forgery. What I loved about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the way the entire story undergoes a reversal in the final pages. The person who thought he understood everything realizes he has understood nothing at all, that he is the dupe and not the master of circumstances. What interested me about Ripley, on the other hand, was the idea of a person who isn’t quite whole, a fake and a forger, a chameleon who insinuates himself into situations, with appalling consequences. I’ve known several people like that, charming cuckoos who set up house in other people’s lives, cause chaos and move on, amused by or oblivious to the damage they have done.

When I was considering the setting, I thought about London in the 1970s, rainy, desperate. At the same time, I was watching a lot of Pasolini and Fellini films. I was particularly interested in the strange and still unsolved story of Pasolini’s murder in 1975. During my reading, I came across the story of the stolen reels. Shortly before Pasolini was killed, purportedly by a hustler on a waste ground in Ostia, some reels from his final film Salò were stolen. It was suggested that these reels may have been used to lure him to his death. Reels were also stolen from Fellini’s Casanova, which was being made at the same studio, Cinecittà, in the same year. I realized some of the same people had worked on both films, including the greatest of all costume designers, Danilo Donati.

In Venice in the summer of 2023, while in a water taxi on my way to the airport, I had a vision of Donati in Venice, making his preliminary drawings for Casanova. I saw him encountering a beautiful red-headed English boy by the steps of the church in Campo Santo Stefano, who would bring chaos into his life. It was a coup de foudre, a love story with devastating consequences. As soon as I got home, I started a new notebook, pasting in a photo of Donati’s brooding face and writing the title, The Silver Book.

It was as if I was taking dictation at high speed; as if I only had to tune my ear and the whole story would be handed to me, line by line.

For a whole year I thought about it obsessively. I went on a research trip to Rome and Venice, visiting Cinecittà. I watched films and documentaries and saturated myself in stories of Italy in the 1970s, during the frightening and febrile “Years of Lead.” The notebook filled up. But I was touring constantly, and I didn’t write anything more than a stray scene or two until I got back to Rome in September 2024. Then it all came out. I have experienced nothing like it in my years as a writer. It was as if I was taking dictation at high speed; as if I only had to tune my ear and the whole story would be handed to me, line by line.

I was staying at the British School at Rome, on the edge of the Borghese Garden. Each day I’d take a walk, trying to steep myself in the city. I hardly spoke to anyone. I lived off pasta from the Carrefour Express in Parioli and wrote from dawn until late into the night. Strange coincidences kept happening. I was invited to a festival in Mantua, which put me a few miles from where Salò was filmed and Donati was raised. That’s where I encountered the astounding zodiac fresco that Nicholas and Dani gaze up at in the opening of Act Two. I realized I needed to see Donati’s costumes, and identified the one person who could provide permission, Clara Tosi Pamphili.

Thanks to Instagram I knew we had friends in common, who helped me track her down. But she wasn’t in Rome, sadly. She was installing a show of the costumes in Berlin. Where was I? As it happened, I was about to board a flight to Berlin, and would coincide with the install. Back in Rome, Clara helped me get into the sanctum sanctorum of Sartoria Farani, where nearly all of Donati’s costumes are preserved, and introduced me to several of his friends.

Fascism, as we are rapidly discovering, depends upon illusion. But there’s a different kind of illusion, which is the illusion that tells the truth.

As I wrote, the story as I had originally plotted it changed. I’d imagined the Nicholas character as wicked, and personally implicated in two deaths. But the boy that emerged on the page was neither cruel nor corrupt. He was very young, very naïve, and deeply damaged by homophobia. That’s one of the key themes of the book, and one of the reasons why I, as a trans person in this moment of intense transphobia, was so drawn to the narrative: because it’s about people living in a world where they’re hated, who nonetheless find a way to form a community, to build solidarity and to find love.

The book became a meditation on power and sex, illusion, danger and desire. Pasolini revealed himself as the visionary, the only person who truly saw what was coming. All the older men in the book had grown up during fascism and what Pasolini glimpsed with his X-ray eyes was its return, the very earliest stirrings of the vast resurgence that is taking place right now across the world. He was the prophet and truth-teller, and Salò was his warning. I think this is why he was murdered, and it is why it feels so crucial to tell his story today.

As for Danilo, he’s the moral center of this complex and shifting narrative, a person who knows how to live, and what matters. It was important to me to pay tribute to an artisan who created illusions by hand—a cinema of paper, glue and scissors, as Fellini liked to say—in this time of AI and fake news, where truth itself is under assault by slippery and nefarious means. The Silver Book is full of illusions of many kinds: some of them beautiful and artful and others designed to do damage, to trick and mislead. Fascism, as we are rapidly discovering, depends upon illusion. But there’s a different kind of illusion, which is the illusion that tells the truth. That’s what Donati, Fellini and especially Pasolini were attempting to produce, which is why their work remains so potent and so sustaining now. The Silver Book is a love story, but it’s also a love story about art, its still-subversive powers and possibilities.

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