The Scent Keeper

“I wondered what it would be like to hold a hand the size of my own, to know someone else who had more questions than answers. I wondered about a lot of things back then.”

Emmeline grows up the victim of what is essentially a kidnapping. Taken by a father desperate to find refuge from his collapsing world, Emmeline grows up in a world where her father is everything. When she sees a boat along the horizon, she wonders what world she is being denied. She is a child denied the critical socialization experience of friends.

“The forest seemed to disappear. I was in the cabin, every scent of it alive: the dried apples in the pantry, the basket of onions in the corner, the lingering whisper of pipe smoke.”

The novel investigates the widely underappreciated olfactory sense. The challenge is to put the tonic experience of an aroma into words. Here, Emmeline compares the experience of smell to being transported into an alternative dimension conjured by a scent but sustained by the imagination that it stirs. Emmeline leaves the forest and feels as if she is back in the cabin, based on the sniff of one of her father’s scented-papers.

“It made no sense. The man was no mermaid. There had been no party. I didn’t understand. But then suddenly I did—and just like that everything was different.”

As a coming-of-age narrative, The Scent Keeper hinges on a number of key narrative points in which young Emmeline learns, one painful experience at a time, that the world is not what it seems. This is that first dramatic moment: Her father has told her the supplies on which they depend—flour, rice, coffee, and chocolates—are left on the island by rogue bands of mermaids. When she sees a man deposit the supplies in the lagoon beach, she understands that something irreversible has happened.

“Days passed. I could feel myself turning into air. The fragrances of the scent-papers became my lungs, the blood in my veins. I found it easier and easier to lose myself in them. My father had taught me to tack a scent, now I went inside the smells, wandering among them like trees in a familiar forest.”

Her father now dead, Emmeline, left alone on the island, survives through her father’s scent-papers. One by one, the scent-papers transport her away from her dire situation; she becomes the scents, moving out of the reality of her abandonment. This reveals the danger of her father’s life-long experiments: abusing the gift of smell by allowing the intellect to use an aroma to simply step away from reality.

“Smells don’t care what the mind or heart wants, however. Scents will find their way around the darkness of closed eyes, slipping past barricades of thought. The body is their accomplice.”

Emmeline, as narrator now looking back, describes the experience of how a particular aroma can find its way into a person’s deepest places. In this, the novel argues that a scent—a perfume, a food, a flower—can become a kind of outer body experience. It is inexplicable, unexpected, and totally transformative but necessarily transient.

“Who am I, Papa. Who were you? But then I felt the question change, get rough on the edges. Why didn’t you tell me?”

On Emmeline’s first birthday off the island, the strong scent of violets, which her father planted all about their cabin, sends her reeling back to those halcyon days. Now living with Colette and Henry, Emmeline subjects her childhood to an interrogation that reveals she has begun the difficult and painful process of growing up. This is her first understanding that adults keep secrets.

“I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes…but underneath it all I could find the person: sadness…fear…love.”

In working at her adoptive parents’ resort, Emmeline realizes her developed sense of smell. The beds that she makes give off a potent aroma of the people who spent the night, the broad reach of their emotional lives revealed by the scents they leave on the sheets. This gift for divining scents will make her important to her scheming mother.

“His eyes were astonishingly green. Like trees in the spring. ‘I’m Fisher,’ he whispered.”

As a coming-of-age novel, The Scent Keeper works two parallel plot lines: Emmeline coming to terms with her parents and then Emmeline coming to terms with the first experience of love. Each plot line allows her to complete the difficult journey toward her sense of identity. Here, she catches her first glimpse of the young man who will introduce her to love. Like in a fairy tale, it is love at first sight. The comparison of his eyes to spring suggests his tonic impact.

“Watch their faces…Never trust a smile that doesn’t make it to their eyes.”

Even as Emmeline must come to learn that virtually every adult she meets keeps secrets, betrays trust, and sometimes outright lies, Fisher’s wisdom here suggests the danger of trusting the insincere. Indeed, their falling out happens only when Emmeline cannot bring herself to share the secret of her father’s death. Love, Emmeline learns, begins and ends with trust.

“For something was happening between us. When we were out of the water, we spoke in gestures more than words, his hand on my arm, his breath on my cheek. Out there, in the midst of all that air, our scents wove together and had their own conversation.”

This moment, when Emmeline and Fisher are tasked to take the boat out to make deliveries to the island residents, marks the beginnings of Emmeline’s sexual awakening. The reassurance she feels talking with Fisher, her curiosity about his life, and her sense of kinship as misfits begins to form into a far more complicated attraction. She notices his body, his breath on her neck, and, for Emmeline most powerful of all, his musky scent.

“The Emperor wanted to keep the bird, but the nightingale said she would never live in a palace again. She would come and sing for him sometimes, but he must never tell anyone.”

The passage, taken from the Andersen fairy tale that her father cut from her book of fairy tales, reveals the danger and futility of her father’s career attempts to capture aromas. It is unwise to make aromas programmable emotional experiences and to deny the magic of being suddenly and unexpectedly transported across time and space by accidentally interacting with a scent. The nightingale in the fairy tale cannot be enslaved by the selfish emperor. In dubbing his contraption the Nightingale, John acknowledges as much.

“I put the paper down. The magical machine of my childhood was a flawed piece of science. My father was a failure. I had a mother. It was the mermaids, all over again. Nothing I had known was true. Nothing was real.”

Midway through her journey to adulthood, Emmeline experiences this moment of complete emotional devastation. Nothing is what she thought it was. This is the nadir of the novel. She understands the unreality of her fairy tale upbringing, and now the Google searches have confirmed the reality of her father. The melodramatic decision to abandon the idea of trust represents how far Emmeline still needs to go. The world is no fairy tale, but it is no existential tragedy either.

“This place will heal you if you let it.”

Emmeline, in returning to the cabin with Fisher for the first time since Henry brought her to Secret Cove, begins to sort through the implications of defining who she is. For all of its emotional hurts, the cabin, she understands, is part of who she is. Healing does not come from denial or hiding from her past but rather in coming to terms with it. A healthy emotional adulthood can only come through putting the cabin into perspective.

“It was me that was different, who couldn’t decide how or where I fit. I yearned to be the child who’d lived here, but I wanted to understand my father, and that would mean leaving childhood behind.”

Emmeline’s insight into the only healthy way to adulthood reveals a pivotal moment in the narrative of her coming of age. She separates the all-too-human need to escape a difficult reality and the adult need to understand that difficult reality. Even with her father’s scented-papers and their ability to transport her to some alternative reality, she knows her past needs to be just that: past.

“But I was seventeen years old, alone on an island with a boy I had loved since the first time he sat down at the desk next to mine. So I closed my eyes and kissed him back, and then we both went up to the loft.”

A pivotal moment in any coming-of-age narrative is the moment of transitioning to adulthood via the first experience of sex. Emmeline has developed a profound friendship with Fisher, and the movement to the sexual experience, represented by the loft in the cabin, seems natural and inevitable. They are two young people taking care of each other in the woods, as Emmeline describes it the following morning (160).

“Going to find the truth.”

The note Emmeline leaves for her adoptive parents before she heads to Vancouver underscores the nature of her journey to self-awareness. Raised within the pleasant illusion of a fairy tale, and then seeing the fairy tale sense of her first love shattered by her unwillingness to share completely with Fisher, Emmeline is now determined to commit herself to honesty. She will find Fisher and make amends; she will find her mother and once and for all define her identity.

“My job is to make things smell better—because when they do people spend more money. They don’t know that’s why, of course. They think they buy the couch because it’s comfortable. But we know better. We make them want it.”

Victoria Wingate introduces a new concept to Emmeline’s young world. She is a sharp and savvy entrepreneur. Her worldview is defined entirely by how she can manipulate others for her own benefit. She is wildly successful; she survives the catastrophe of the Nightingale venture by throwing her husband under the bus. Now she runs a global corporation driven to treat consumers like Pavlovian dogs, able to be conditioned by smells to buy things and, in turn, make Victoria wealthy.

“It was a test; I knew that. Still, it was one I desperately wanted to pass. For Victoria, my sense of smell didn’t make me weird—and if I proved I knew was I was doing, it could make me special. Maybe it would make her love me, want to keep me.”

Emmeline, despite being 18 years old and despite her independence, is still a child seeking the approval of her parents, even when that parent is revealed to the reader as a user. The test Victoria gives Emmeline is only to determine whether her daughter has inherited her father’s delicate sense of smell, a talent she can use. Emmeline’s assumption that pleasing her mother will show her mother’s love is one last childhood fantasy she will have to let go of.

“I’d been going at this puzzle all wrong. I’d been following Claudia’s approach, treating the scents like component parts instead of living things I knew they were…fragrances were never like that. They mingled and danced and whispered.”

This moment marks Emmeline’s triumph over both her father’s sense of smell as an escape and her mother’s crass idea that smells can be weaponized in the marketplace. Here, Emmeline realizes any scent cannot be built from some formula. Rather, they exist as complicated, organic things that can be appreciated but not captured.

“What was I doing in this city? I’d been leaping from one thing to the next, chasing Fisher, following my mother, filling my loneliness with her assurances that I was special. I had made masterpieces—but they’d been crafted for her approval.”

The first moment of self-awareness in a child transitioning into adulthood can be a painful epiphany. Here, Emmeline understands the misdirection of her pursuit of Fisher and her need for her mother’s approval. She understands she cannot fill with the illusions of other people the loneliness that has been in her heart since she first perceived the nature of her life on the island with her father. For the first time, Emmeline sees she must define herself as she is, not as others see her.

“I took a deep breath. The water stilled around us. ‘I killed my father.’”

This is a moment of dramatic sharing. Finally, after trying so hard to keep it to herself, Emmeline unburdens her deepest and darkest secret to Fisher: her role in the death of her father. This reveals the depth of her emotional bond with her lover. More than their long conversations and their physical expressions of love, this moment of honesty defines the love the two share.

“Men will always betray you…Men are selfish. They may or may not mean to be, but they are.”

Victoria, after appearing to be a loving mother given a second chance to bond with her daughter, reveals her toxic sensibility. Emmeline sees, in this moment in the bar, that her mother’s heart is shriveled and ossified. Her success in business came at the cost of her compassion and her empathy. Victoria wants to be her daughter’s mentor, but to do that Emmeline must buy into a deeply flawed vision of survival through distrust, paranoia, and emotional distance.

“Because people want their bodies to smell like oceans they’ll never have time to visit. They wear a perfume that promises sex, when all they really want is someone to snuggle on the couch with in baggy pajamas. We’ll all choose a good story over the truth any day.”

In a single broad statement, Victoria reveals her cynical willingness to use the delicate miracle of aromas and scents to manipulate people. She uses artificially created scents to give people an entirely artificial perception of their world and even themselves. Here she reveals how she understands exactly what she is doing: selling fantasies to the gullible.