45 pages • 1 hour read
The Scent Keeper
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Themes
The Power of the Olfactory Sense
The novel explores the underappreciated way in which scents, more than sights or sounds, trigger powerful, involuntary memory responses that are detailed and vivid. Only recently in the 2010s did researchers begin to understand how aromas can conjure memories and even store them within a section of the brain. Those scents are forever part of a person’s identity. Professor John Hartfell, pioneering researcher into the power of scents to recreate memories, is fond of telling his young, impressionable daughter during their long exile together on the island, “People lie, Emmeline, but smells never do.” Each scent is a memory, and each scent is a story.
The problem that perplexes Professor Hartfell is that aromas dissipate, even those captured on his scent-papers. If individual scents fade—a perfume, for instance, of your first lover or the smell of your grandfather’s cigar—that smell is forever retained within the brain, waiting for a recurrence of the smell to trigger that memory. When Emmeline’s father tests one of his scent-papers on her, one that records the smells of the forest, she recalls, “I was in the forest… The fragrance on the paper had been different, separate” (20).
Both of Emmeline’s parents appreciate the power of the sense of smell but for different reasons. For John, the power of the olfactory sense deepens a person’s emotional experiences, makes the past vivid and immediate, and helps a person understand the impact of memories that might otherwise fade. John dies trying to retrieve the bottled scent of his daughter when she was a newborn. Inhale that, and John can relive the wonder, magic, and joy of those precious days that otherwise so quickly passed. For Victoria, however, that neuroscientific research promises a bonanza of wealth. She wants to use scents to encourage people, subliminally, to purchase items they might otherwise not. Flood a jewelry store with the scent of flowers, which suggest romance and weddings, and sales of engagement rings spike. Flood an upscale department store with a scent tinctured with indole, a bacterial growth in feces, and that organic whiff creates a sense of dark urgency to purchase things on impulse. Either way, aromas are established as a critical agency through which a person communicates with the world and with their past.
The Dynamics of Memory
The novel argues that every person lives within the present and the past simultaneously. Memory is an elemental part of a person’s identity. The sequences of events that remain archived in the brain’s data base shape and distort a person’s outlook, character, and perspective. Memory cannot be ignored. The novel explores how memory is activated, how memories can be triggered, and, more disconcertingly, how memories can be manipulated.
At the age of nine, Emmeline has no memories other than the life she and her father have created tucked away in the remote island world. Her father, by contrast, retreats to the island refuge to escape memories he cannot shed: memories of his catastrophic business failure, his fall from prominence in his field, and most painful of all how the woman he loved coolly let him take the blame for the failure of the Nightingale project. In his nearly 20-year investigation into the relationship between the olfactory sense and memory, John believes the mind can be directed to revisit endlessly moments of joy. Scents, he posits, retrieve those memories and, by extension, keep the painful memories at a safe distance. When his research project fails, he becomes obsessed, like a mad scientist who tries to overcome the limits of humanity itself.
Victoria fares no better. Like a programmed database, she simply elects to delete memories of her failed marriage and of her daughter. Emmeline struggles initially to understand why her mother never went looking for her. If her father believes painful memories can be massaged away through a kind of aromatherapy, her mother, far more practical and mercenary, opts to forget those memories.
In the Epilogue, Emmeline addresses her unborn daughter and promises to share with her all her memories—the joys and the agonies, the happiness and the fears—because memory is the only way to navigate life responsibly. To borrow from the novel’s use of fairy tales, it is the only way to live happily ever after.
The Corrosive Effect of Secrets
After climbing to the bluff to show her new pet goat the lay of the island, Emmeline chances to see a small boat pull into the island’s lagoon. A short man with white hair gets out and deposits some black plastic boxes that Emmeline recognizes as boxes of their supplies that her father told her were brought to the island by friendly mermaids. It is a defining moment in young Emmeline’s difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. She is just nine. Watching the man deliver the boxes along the beach, Emmeline realizes a stunning and shocking truth: Her father lied to her. She recalls, “All I knew that day on the beach was that my father had told me a lie” (39).
But what destroys the fairy tale relationship between a young Emmeline and her father—and what later nearly destroys the tender love between Emmeline and Fisher—is not lying. She does not lie to Fisher. She harbors a truth she cannot bring herself to share. John is the same. Her father invents and embellishes, creating a fairy tale to explain how the two managed to secure necessities not grown on the island. It is not that John lies; rather, he keeps secrets. The stories he tells convince Emmeline that all is well. The revelation of the secrets and their toxic effect nearly destroys her
Kidnapped to the remote island, Emmeline trusts her father to be honest. He is honest but in his own indirect way. The fairy tales he spins about a naïve young boy who falls under the spell of a wicked enchantress is his way of sharing with his daughter the reality of his troubled life. Veiling his past in the trappings of a fairy tale keeps his daughter in the dark. Finding out that there was no mermaid crew bringing supplies begins Emmeline’s painful evolution from her childhood. Her father kept things from her, and in that moment of realization she understands that lies are weapons.
It is a lesson she will learn more painfully when at a critical moment with Fisher she decides not to share with him her darkest and most troubling secret: her part in her father’s death. Fisher has just shared with her his darkest secret: the abuse he and his mother suffer at the hands of his father. But Emmeline stops herself. Fisher can sense her keeping back, “the hurt of it slapped across his face” (162). She temporarily loses Fisher over the secret—and sharing the secret when they are in each other’s arms beneath a blanket in Fisher’s houseboat (295-300) will mark their return to love.
The Relationship between Science, Business, and Humanity
In many ways, the sense of smell is the most intimate and mysterious of the senses. The enticing aromas of scents entice specifically because they trigger an intimate and individual response. As Victoria explains to a dubious Emmeline, if Inspire floods the ventilation system of an upscale jewelry store with the aroma of fresh-cut roses, associated with love, sales of engagement rings tend to spike. But she admits that triggering sensation depends on the individual. The aroma entices only those whose life experiences have convinced them of the viability and importance of love. The same scent will not the same way on different people.
That is the human factor in the sense of smell. That human factor is what challenges and defeats both John and Victoria, though for different reasons. Neither the scientist nor the entrepreneur can work with the stubborn, imperfect realities of the human factor. In the investigation into the compelling power of aromas, John and Victoria pursue radically different perceptions of the value of such research. Initially, for John, creating the scent-papers and bottling them each represents the highest calling of a scientist. In an unsettling manifestation of the kind of pride that has long made the stories of scientists cautionary tales against the dangers of arrogance, he decides his research might help preserve happy memories and in turn delete unhappy ones. Such experiments, however, radically displace and even make irrelevant the human factor: The novel argues that science cannot perfect humanity without losing what most makes us human.
Business, represented by Victoria’s Inspire corporation, does not fare much better. Commerce—here represented by the mercenary business plan that Victoria devises to manipulate people like Pavlovian subjects—treats people like objects to be crassly used and manipulated, all the while letting them think they were making their big item purchase decisions on their own. Like science, business robs humanity of its free will. John wants to bottle scents that will bring back pleasant memories on a schedule. Victoria wants to use the brain’s susceptibility to fetching scents and, in turn, compel a person to spend money to benefit a business that otherwise would not have had that kind of influence. In that way, John and Victoria represent two radically manifestations of the same toxic thinking.
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