Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
by Patrick Süskind
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Set in eighteenth century France, this is the story of olfactory genius Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and his murderous quest for the perfect scent. An olfactory take on a foreign time and place, this blew my mind. No wonder it sold over fifteen million copies.
The darkly enigmatic 2006 German thriller movie, which I watched first, was remarkable. Rising UK star Ben Whishaw took the title role, flanked by Hollywood stalwart Dustin Hoffman and Royal Shakespeare veteran Alan Rickman. The novel, though, in a class of its own, must have seemed near impossible to adapt to even the deftest filmmaker.
How Patrick Süskind achieved this sensuous masterpiece, how long it must have taken, is unimaginable. The somewhat protracted premise resembles that of some great European classic:
Our protagonist is born at a stinking fish stall in Paris. His mother, whose previous four babies born thus have arrived dead or dying, expects him be the same. She cuts his umbilical cord and leaves him for dead. But when baby Grenouille cries aloud from the fish heads and guts, his mother is caught and tried for multiple infanticide. Found guilty, she is hanged.
Grenouille's various wet nurses find him too greedy so offload him to others. When given to a parish church, he is assigned a wet nurse named Jeanne Bussie. Jeanne returns Grenouill to the priest, Terrier, complaining that he drinks her dry and has no scent, she claims he is possessed by the devil.
Unconvinced, Terrier dismisses the wet nurse and holds Grenouille himself. Curious, Terrier takes a smell, but there is indeed none. When Grenouille awakens and sniffs the air, Terrier feels that the baby is sniffing his soul, examining his deepest secrets. Recoiling, he too now considers the baby a devil. He runs across town and leaves the infant at an orphanage on the outskirts of Paris.
Endowed with extraordinary olfactory capacities, Grenouille navigates the orphanage using only smell and seldom sight. Unafraid of much and readily accepting of discipline, Grenouille grows up cold and emotionless. When the orphanage proprietor realises Grenouille can sniff out hidden cash, she becomes unnerved and apprentices him out to a tanner.
Grenouille the youth explores Paris in his leisure time, memorising its symphony of urban odours. With no specially preferred scent, he greedily seeks out any he can. Paris is filthy, its inhabitants crammed together into ancient, narrow streets. One day, after memorising all these stenches, he encounters one quite unlike all the familiar filthy ones. Tracing its source to a young virginal girl slicing plums, his heart races.
Unacquainted with love or affection, he is perplexed by his newfound arousal for this virginal female scent. Edging closer to better smell her, he causes the girl to startle. She turns, sees him and freezes in fear. Grenouille covers her mouth and smothers her. He strips her, lays her on the ground and smells her scent until it leaves her body, along with her life.
He memorises her scent, the first one he has ever perceived as 'good'. Pleasantly dazed, Grenouille returns to the tanner's shop where he sleeps. He decides he must become a creator of scents, the greatest perfumer in the world, so as to recreate this virgin's scent.
In his quest to isolate and preserve aromas, he becomes apprenticed to a once great perfumer, Baldini, proving himself a talented pupil. His special ability to discern and dissect scents helps him create fabulous perfumes that restore Baldini's profile, making him Paris's most popular perfumer.
So begins a long and convoluted journey that traverses the French countryside to, amongst other places, Grasse, home of the great perfumers, all the while inside the head of this exquisitely monstrous character who we somehow both condemn yet understand.
Whilst the novel explores the olfactory sense and the relationship with emotions that scents carry, it is also a story of universal human morality.
Consuming Süskind's pros became such an all-consuming experience that the tapestry like plot became almost incidental. If you never read this book, you will have missed out on something truly magnificent. Not a quick read or an easy one, but indisputably worth the weeks spent bleary-eyed, page-flicking into the wee small hours with a tortured little bedside light begging to be switched off.
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