*Quick note: The picture above is actually from the movie based on the novel. I just think it’s a far more evocative image than any of the book covers.*
If I were to guess at what a book called ‘Perfume’ was about, I’m sure that all my guesses would not even come close to this macabre tale of human depravity.
Indeed, I can’t remember reading a book with any more than superficial similarities to this work of fiction. ‘Perfume – the story of a murderer’ is a dark look at 18th century France from the viewpoint of the most gifted of abominations; a being excluded from humanity for his lack of odour and driven by a need to categorise existence using his super-human sense of smell.
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born amid the squalor of a Parisian market place. From this less than auspicious birth, he works his way out from the lower dredges of society to…well…a slightly higher one. He then revitalises a fading perfume empire before discovering his true goal in life: to perfect a divine scent.
Whilst taking the steps to his eventual goal, the protagonist learns skills that will help him in his quest. This enables him to create specific aromas; each one designed to cover his lack of a natural scent as well as provoke certain responses from other people.
Darkly inspired by his murder of a sublimely odorous young girl, Grenouille seeks out this scent upon other females. With a lifetimes worth of experience in perfumery and distillery, he is then able to capture this quasi-magical bouquet for his own use.
The resulting fragrance is everything he ever hoped for, and more. However, he realises his purpose was hollow and worthless from the start and that he will never have what he truly wants.
A disturbing, cynical and sometimes slightly unnerving book; Patrick Süskind’s tale is nonetheless an engaging one. The story of an olfactory vampire that seeks only to perfect a library of smells that exists only for him; travelling through a world witnessed through the most underestimated of senses.
This is not an uplifting read, far from it. Grenouille himself seems to be an agent of death; a thing apart from the world and bringing death and misery to all the lives he touches.
‘The Crimson Petal and the White’ has been described as ‘the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely’. If that is so, then ‘Perfume – The story of a murder’ is the novel he might had written had he been French, miserable and a little bit nuts.
Rating: 
