Taking place on Wednesday 10th June from 7pm in Artisan, the event offers readers the chance to hear Laing in conversation about their haunting and cinematic novel, described as ‘heartbreaking’ by journalist Nigel Slater OBE.
Set against the dreamlike backdrop of 1970s Italian cinema, The Silver Book is a Queer love story following Nicholas, a young English artist who finds himself swept into the dazzling and dangerous world of legendary costume and production designer Danilo Donati. Moving from Venice to Rome and into the legendary studios of Cinecittà, the novel unfolds amid the political unrest of Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’, where glamour, illusion and violence become impossible to separate.
Laing is the internationally acclaimed author of The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times bestseller The Garden Against Time. Their first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and their work has been translated into twenty-one languages.
Ahead of the event, we’re delighted to share an exclusive extract from The Silver Book:
After that, there are no more afternoons in bed. Nicholas has never worked so hard in his life. This is a holiday, Danilo says, disbelieving. Wait until you get on set. His job is to draw architectural details. Each morning he takes the pencilled list of addresses and voyages alone through the maze of Venice.
Sometimes he travels with the pack of tourists, frightening the pigeons in St Mark’s, and other days he joins the old ladies with their shopping bags on the vaporetto. The workings of the city excite him. The reeking fish market, the light running in rivulets up and down the walls, the ribbons of black seaweed that flutter by the quay. He is welcomed into houses like palaces, houses he would never have seen alone, brought coffee in pink and gold Meissen cups so fragile he is frightened to pick them up.
When he returns, sometimes with sandwiches, Danilo is inevitably at work, sitting at the desk with the lamp on night and day. Did you take my set square, he shouts, not looking up. No Dani, it’s on the windowsill, right by you. The air is heavy with the smell of the fixative he uses. Nicholas opens all the windows, returns the set square, drops his sketches on the table. I got you tuna. I hate tuna, Danilo says, and kisses him.
If he’s lucky, if he’s quiet, he will be able to watch Danilo at work. It is fascinating to Nicholas, the way he converts the real city they are travelling through into scenes from a story. The feeling Nicholas has, looking at these drawings, is that Danilo is on terms with the world. Nothing is vague or approximate. If he draws a chair, it is a real, precise chair, even if it is only indicated with a few scribbled lines. It is as if he knows and has sat in every chair in every period in history. The same is true of ships, churches, dresses. How do you know so much, he asks and Danilo actually stops his hand for a minute and smiles up at him. Nico, you have to look.
One afternoon, they take a boat out on to the lagoon to solve the problem of the Adriatic. Surely you could just film the sea, Nicholas says. Or, I don’t know, don’t you have tanks in your cinema city? Yes, Danilo concedes, we do have tanks, big enough to film twelve shipwrecks. But film is strange. It’s not like looking with your eyes. You can’t just film a bowl of cherries and expect them to look like cherries on the screen.
Okay, says Nicholas. How do you make snow?
Feathers. Rolled oats. Tissue paper. Marble dust. Never salt, it eats the electrics. For La Strada they used bags of and a hundred bed sheets. Best of all, Parmesan cheese!
Hail?
Broken mothballs.
Ice?
Water sprayed with paraffin wax. We’ll do that for Casanova.
Glass?
Sugar.
Sugar?
Salt!
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