The Scent Keeper

At the start of the book, Emmeline narrates, “Back before there was time, I lived with my father on an island, tucked away in an endless archipelago that reached up out of the cold salt water, hungry for air” (1). Effortlessly and easily, the novel begins with the gentle lyrical feel of a fairy tale. The only thing missing in this opening line is the phrase, “Once upon a time.” On the surface, the whimsical narrative involves a young innocent girl living on a remote island with her loving, if eccentric, mad scientist father, surrounded by magical woods full of magical scents. Living without any sense of time or real-world responsibilities or interactions, her necessities brought by a band of mermaids, Emmeline knows only that reality.

However, these chapters establish this novel as defined by two conflicting perspectives. This is a coming-of-age story: Emmeline is a child whose perspective here is more than willing to accept the fairy tale atmosphere that the narrator of the novel, a grown-up Emmeline, understands is not real and indeed cannot last. That frame is suggested by the Prologue in which a grown-up Emmeline addresses a child she is carrying: “I can feel you, my little fish, swimming in the tidal motion of my blood, my breath.” Thus, this otherwise magical and enticing fairy tale is rendered suspect. The island where they live, the adult Emmeline admits, “was a place to run away, although I didn’t understand that at the time” (1).

The novel places a typical young girl in an abnormal environment where her typical characteristics make her feel eccentric, odd, and out of place. The adult Emmeline compares her young self to Alice, who tumbles down into the rabbit hole where the most absurd and odd events appear normal and where the normal appears eccentric and abnormal.

To grow up, Emmeline must shatter this fairy tale world. She must depart it because, as the grown-up Emmeline understands, it is an unhealthy illusion created and sustained by a father whose scientific experiments reveal his own tenuous grasp on reality. He wants to manufacture scents that, in defiance of the natural order of things, will never fade. They will be forever preserved in bottles where, on a person’s whim, the scent can be experienced anew, recalling some tender and splendid moment in the imagination. Her father wants to defy time by controlling what people cannot control. He seeks refuge from the real-world. His daughter believes him to be her magical hero and the center of her life. However, the adult Emmeline—and by extension the reader—is not so sure. The sheer unnaturalness of John’s experiments is lost on young Emmeline. Because she is a child, she buys into her father’s fantasy and relishes her experiences with the scented-papers.

While the scented-papers suggest the unnaturalness of the father’s experiments and, in turn, the unnaturalness of the island itself, Emmeline grows up quite naturally. Fed on the unreal worlds of fairy tales, Emmeline struggles against the oppressive real world even though she is too young to appreciate who she really is: a victim of parental kidnapping. She is also unable to recognize that her father is a quack, his experiments are hopelessly futile, and the island is his refuge.

Emmeline is curious about where her mother is, why none of the boats she glimpses from the bluff ever stop, and why the two of them are on the island at all. She is lonely and possesses an instinctual need for others her age who have the same questions, the same curiosity, and the same restless spirit. With increasing courage, she boldly explores her island. Kids are supposed to be curious, social, and confident. These attributes, however, within the claustrophobic world created by her control-freak father, are threats and a cause for her uneasiness. When Emmeline innocently asks her father why he keeps the bottles with the scented-papers so high up in the shelves, he responds cryptically, “It’s our job to protect them now” (22).

The fairy tale world quickly shatters when Emmeline sees the man—not a mermaid—dropping off their supplies. Then, she experiences genuine helplessness as the rogue bear attacks and kills her pet goat, leaving her seemingly omnipotent father suddenly helpless, hiding behind the locked door of the cabin for two days: “I was furious at my father’s deception” (40). Emmeline’s rebellion takes the form of her guerrilla campaign to throw her father’s precious bottles of scented-paper into the sea—all of them, “or it would mean nothing” (51). It is a moment of self-assertion: “I shook my head, lifted the bottle high, and threw it as far as I could” (53). Typical in a coming-of-age novel, the moment is as terrifying as it is exhilarating. “It’s amazing how easily we can cast ourselves in the role of hero,” the adult Emmeline interjects, cautioning the unborn child with whom she is sharing her story that perhaps this bold declaration of independence might be a bit premature.

The death of her father is surrounded by mystery. She wonders why he jumped so recklessly after the bottle and why his last words were that he loves her. The end of any fairy tale marks the beginning of the difficult transition into an adult world, where mysteries are not adventures to enjoy or puzzles to solve and where being alone is no magical fantasy. In the days after her father’s death—it is unclear whether it is an accident or a suicide—the novel moves away from the lyrical feel of a fairy tale and into the harder edged feel of realism.