Scentsate

Perfume as a concept is still teetering between the realms of art and science, but the popular eye hasn’t yet seen it set up camp in either. As a result, scent is often portrayed as a mystical, sexual thing (see Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume or any pheromone marketing schtick) that has power over subconscious urges and is waiting to be harnessed. Funneled from the genres of fairy tale, harlequin novel, and coming-of-age story comes Margot Berwin’s second book, Scent of Darkness, which makes use of the trope in a melancholy way.

Margot’s main character, 18-year-old Evangeline, moves to New Orleans when her beloved “aromata” (perfumer) grandmother, Louise, dies and leaves her the house. Louise only forbade Eva from going into one room in the house, and Eva obeys this wish until she meets a boy named Gabriel, whom in typical 18-year-old fashion she believes will bring her both the pinnacle of joy and the nadir of sorrow. This turns out to be true, because he coaxes her to go into the room and open a perfume Louise made for her, which a note warns will change her life forever. As a result, Eva is infused with a jasmine, rose, fire, and leather scent which is subsequently shown to be the most beautiful and powerful scent in the world. This scent, which Eva herself has no control over, leads her to become a muse for a bitterly mediocre painter who endangers her life for his art.

The strength of Berwin’s novel is the extremes. While the basic plot is predictable, the symbolism, the archetypes, everything about the novel that could have been ridiculous is made masterful. And the scent as melancholy is done just right. Louise says of a pastor who smells of fig: “He has the scent of someone who gives it their all but does not succeed. It bursts into bloom with all its vigor, and it tries so hard to hang on, but it dies as soon as it leaves the vine. He’ll try to hang on but he won’t make it. A rush, maybe of insight, and then a swift death. One of the sweetest scents on earth, the fig.” Time is seen as lost opportunities: Louise tells Eva that a scent should have “a sadness for a desire that will never be met, a person who got away, or a thing that can never be had. All the great perfumes contain this feeling.”

Eva’s melancholy is, of course, that she never really knows if she is loved for herself or her scent.

Berwin is not afraid of uncomfortable truths. In fact, she embraces them. It makes me uncomfortable how much Eva hates her mother. The line about how the smoke cloud over her face is a good thing because it covers the “mottled and sagging” wrinkles caused by that smoke is excellent. It makes me uncomfortable that no character in this entire novel has ever had a good relationship, and that Eva knows that and fears for her future. But possibly the single greatest part of Scent of Darkness is how Eva reacts to her grandmother’s death. She feels guilty that she is paying more attention to Gabriel than bemoaning her loss. She imagines an accumulation of loved ones building up later in her life, all waiting for their turn to be grieved properly because she didn’t learn how to do it right the first time. It doesn’t fully hit Eva that Louise is dead until she meets another mystic.

The weakness of the novel is its heroine. While Eva’s character is easy to empathize with- she spends much of her time worrying about whether she is treating people well and she strongly resists an affair- she isn’t distinctive enough. Because she was nondescript before her scent, it makes sense that she is probably the most passive femme fatale I can imagine. Although in all honesty it is difficult to imagine a more passive human being in general. Her activities as she describes them are sleeping 14 hours a day and walking around New Orleans by herself at night. When she starts getting fat, she goes to the gym and is immediately exhausted by watching people “running to nowhere on the treadmills…like the new Sisyphuses of our time.” I laughed out loud at that point, but I’m not sure it was intended to be funny. The confusing part is that Eva wants to be useful: she falls in love with the painter because he gives her a purpose. But no mention is ever made of Eva’s future work or school endeavors.

Granted, people like this do exist, and Lena Dunham’s Girls has endeared us to female leads who are the opposite of go-getters. But Eva’s grandmother intended the perfume to reflect the personality Eva had already. I am left wishing Eva was a more interesting character, since her scent is so dangerous that she was told to leave New Orleans forever.

Despite the slowness of the main character, I should point out that Scent of Darkness is a really fast read. I finished it in 24 hours. The intensity of the story is what kept me reading, but the imagery is what stayed with me. The lasting impact is that I’ve never been to New Orleans, but now I very much want to go there.

Scent of Darkness has also been reviewed at
The Washington Post
NPR
Now Smell This

Come by tomorrow to read an interview with Margot Berwin!