“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” cannot be said to be a murder mystery, as its title tells us what it is about, and the murderer is the protagonist. It has a unique hook, as in the motive of the murderer, a man with a hyperacute sent of smell, being to find and harness the most beautiful scent. It is extremely well written. Is it a good book? Let’s see.

Jean-Baptist Grenouille is born literally in a Paris street in the eighteenth century. He is an orphan and is raised in an orphanage of sorts, until the woman in charge apprentices him to a tanner. The wet nurse who fed him as a baby refused to deal with him after a while, saying he had no scent. This was true, but the woman in charge of the orphanage had no sense of smell herself, so didn’t know this. The reader is told that Grenouille has a fabulous sense of smell, the best in the world. He is a person who has no redeeming qualities, is spectacularly narcissistic, and sees others only as a means to an end. Of all fictional serial killers he has to be the one with the weirdest motive. He is only interested in how things smell and manages to apprentice himself to a perfumer in order to learn the trade. He wants to create the ultimate perfume, the best smell in the world, but not because he wants money, only for himself.  What he decides the best smell in the world is, leads him to his killing spree.

This author writes extremely well. The descriptive passages are detailed and evocative. The reader can be immersed in the dirty smelly streets of Paris, or the overpowering perfumes of the perfume shop:

His stock ranged from essences absolues – floral oils, tinctures, extracts, secretions, balms, resins, and other drugs in dry, liquid or waxy form – through diverse pomades, pastes, powders, soaps, cremes, sachets, bandolines, brilliantines, moustache waxes, wart removers and beauty spots …

The core idea of this story has the benefit of originality. Of all the motives for murder, scent is something that no one would think of. (Why did he kill them? He wanted their scent.) it’s highly innovative and, for all its failings, the author can be commended for that. It is actually very hard to come up with something truly original.

Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.

There are a few problems about this book that stopped it from being a good book, in spite of the writer’s skill. First and foremost is that the premise, while admittedly innovative, is unbelievable. It stretches credibility way beyond my ability to suspend disbelief. Unfortunately, that meant that for all it’s well-crafted prose, it was very hard to be immersed in the story. I have seen it called fantasy, attributing the main character’s supernatural sense of smell to that aspect. Yes, it is fantastical, but if we are to believe it is meant to be fantasy that needs to be established in some way. It does not specify any kind of supernatural activity at all. Grenouille has an abnormally good sense of smell, he himself has no odour at all, and that’s it. He also has no morals, no ethics, and no real personality. The culmination of his plan to make the ultimate scent is so far-fetched that it makes the ending of the book both sordid and ridiculous. The only other aspect that might be called fantastical is that, every time Grenouille left someone he’d been living with or learning from, they died soon afterwards. In my opinion, the author needed to ground that in fantasy for it to be considered such. The fact that he doesn’t do so makes it, again, unbelievable.

It has also been called horror. Being grotesque and occasionally revolting is not enough for a true horror story. There is no suspense and no eery atmosphere.

Grenouille is almost a blank slate with no identifying characteristics other than his unbelievable sense of smell. He experiences few setbacks in his quest for the perfect scent. He has no motivation other than smell, which is quite a base level, almost instinctual characteristic, however veiled in the art of perfumery it may be. He is massively narcissistic, as is described in his sojourn in the wilderness:

There was not the least notion of God in his head. He was not doing penance or wating for some supernatural inspiration. He had withdrawn solely for his own pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating-and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake lived in the wide world outside.

At no point does Grenouille show any redeeming features. I think that was a massive mistake in this story – I would assume the author intended him to come across as bestial, but a nasty character who murders a lot of girls and has no charm or any character trait other than his monomaniacal pursuit of a single goal, is not, in the end, very interesting. He does not appear to even have a sex drive – his pursuit of the girls has nothing to do with their physical attractiveness, but their smell. The author describes him as a ‘tick’ – a parasite gorging on smell instead of blood. Why should the reader care about this?

(As an aside, the idea that ‘virginity’ has a scent is utterly nonsensical and frankly a little misogynistic in my opinion).

Without giving spoilers for the ending, it ends in such a pointless way that as a reader I felt cheated. I had soldiered on through this book believing that there would be a satisfying outcome, and there wasn’t:

There was only one thing the perfume could not do. It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else. So, to hell with it he thought. To hell with the world. With the perfume. With himself.

In conclusion, “Perfume – Story of a Murderer” is a very well-written bad novel. I have heard many good things about it and was anticipating a good read. I was very disappointed. I believe some people do like it, but I would say read it at your own risk.