Barre with Justine

“…no fragrance is ever balanced without a touch of musk, or smoke, or sadness. Base notes can come from dark places, but they can create beauty all the same. They are reminders of what we will do to live, and what we can give each other.”

*note: this may contain spoilers!*

The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister is the book I chose for this winter’s Wellness Book Club for Brock students and it is the first book pick that I hadn’t already read before the Club! Luckily, this was a beautiful and easy book to read, evocative in its description of the senses and the complexities of fragrance in our lives.

The main character, Emmeline, grows up on a lonely island with her father, who teaches her survival skills and guides her extraordinary sense of smell as she grows up. He is the inventor of a mysterious machine that captures scents on paper but is secretive and evasive about its purpose or the meaning behind the many bottles of scent papers he has stored in their isolated cabin.

Emmeline’s father creates a magical world for his little girl, with stories about fragrance, the mermaids who deliver gifts to the island, and a book of fairy tales that he reads from.

At some point in our lives the magical spell of childhood is broken and, for Emmeline, it is the heartbreaking loss of her father and the opening of a new life away from the island.

The book traces Emmeline’s gift for scents and her desire to uncover the secrets of her mysterious childhood.

My thoughts on the book:

I loved tracing the connections between scent and memories in the book. The Nightingale, the machine that captures scents like Polaroids, is a flawed creation because the scents don’t last but how appropriate is this as a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of aromas – they wisp in and then vanish as quickly as they come. They evoke memories long buried and can be impossible to describe. They can be dark and heavy, like secrets, or light and joyful. We have very little control over scents and they are powerful enough to go straight to the part of our brains that deal with emotion and memory. 

“Smells don’t care what the mind or heart wants…Scents will find their way around the darkness of closed eyes, slipping past barricades of thought.” (65)

I remember the smell of my Nana’s house in Wales but it is so difficult to put in words. The scent of cigarettes, walls infused with years of family, cooked dinners, and emotions – happiness, laughter, and grief (my mother’s brother died in childhood). Once in a very long while I will step into an older house and be instantly transported to that place and time.

As a student of aromatherapy, it was interesting to take the glimpse inside Victoria’s company Inspire Inc. and the creation of perfumes; how fragrance can be used to manipulate human emotions and satisfy desires that we don’t even know we have. Victoria is convinced that perfumes can make things perfect, whereas Emmeline knows that it’s the imperfection of a fragrance that draws you deeper in:

“I’d been trying to come up with a fragrance that was a perfectly polished equation, but the fragrances I knew were never like that. They mingled and danced and whispered. Their scents slipped into yours, and each of you changed the other, became something new.”

Discussion Themes:

Scent and Emotion

One of the students brought up the idea of synesthesia and how difficult it is to separate the sense of smell from other senses. In the Scent Keeper, scents are described as tasting like honey or being ‘brittle’. We often lack the proper words to describe scents, which can evoke such deep and complicated emotions. If you have held a baby, think about how difficult it is to describe the scent of a newborn, despite it being (to me!) one of the most beautiful and life-changing fragrances in the world!

Scent and Memory

We also talked about the comparison of the Nightingale with Polaroid cameras (where the pictures fade over time) and how memories are like that too – we think we remember things better than we actually do. It made me think also of how many pictures we capture today with our phones during special moments (concerts, life moments, etc.) and how we often take ourselves out of the experience to do so. 

“people lie, Emmeline, but scents never do”

One phrase comes up again and again in the novel and that is that scents never lie. Emmeline’s father says that people lie but scents never do. Throughout the book, lies are uncovered but the reader is left to decide if some lies are worse than others. Are the lies that Emmeline’s father told her ‘kind’? Are the lies that Fisher’s mother told his father, told from a place of desperation, easier to accept?

In the book, scents don’t lie but people (notably Victoria) USE scents to manipulate others. In a sense, scents are pure but how they can be manipulated by human hands is where they become part of how we try to shape our own stories. As Emmeline observes: “We’ll all choose a good story over the truth any day.”

the weight of childhood trauma

I couldn’t help but think of my own children when reading about Emmeline’s isolation and how she tries to cope when she loses her father. It tears me up a bit to think back on those passages now! Children absorb and internalize so much more than we give them credit for. They feel responsibility for the emotions of others, especially their parents, and I believe they often shape themselves to fit around the world they experience. In The Scent Keeper, Fisher develops the skill of reading people, anticipating their movements and motivations. As secrets are revealed and trust is broken, Emmeline protects her father by burying them inside of herself.

In a beautiful nod to the innocence of childhood, she notes:

“I wonder sometimes how I could have ever believed in mermaids. I never would have accepted something like the Easter bunny- I knew too much about chickens and who they let take their eggs away. But I had seen flowers bloom into fruit, like straw turned into gold. I’d seen the way sea anemones seemed to die and be born again with every shift of the tide. I’d found seashells that spiraled into themselves, and my father had told me that those elegant shapes once housed animals. In such a world, mermaids did not seem impossible.”

Despite her isolation, Emmeline had a beautiful childhood that likely lasted much longer than it would have in today’s world. I mentioned to one student how, at first, I had no sense of when the story took place until the mention of cell phones. Similarly, we discussed how the locations were also vague but that we could guess the city was in Canada since there is mention of Emmeline (at 18) being nearly old enough to be served alcohol.

Overall, this book was so rewarding to read. I experienced all of my senses when reading it, imagining the landscape and the sounds of the island, the richness of Emmeline’s immersion in scents, and felt the heartbreak of loss and regret.

Have you read this book? Tell me what you thought!

Bauermeister, Erica. The Scent Keeper. First ed. St. Martin’s Press 2019.