The Scent Keeper

Fisher shows how a child grows emotionally, psychologically, and even spiritually within a toxic home life. His father is a frustrated and angry man for whom every day is a bitter lesson in his life’s disappointments. His mother is a passive self-sacrificing presence certain that abiding her husband’s emotional terrorism and bald threats is the only way to negotiate a peaceful home. In a novel centrally interested in how the past defines the present—after all, that is the core assumption behind the Nightingale project—Fisher emerges as an exemplar of how not to let the past destroy a person.

As the only son of a fisherman, Fisher is conditioned to assume life will be lonely. His commitment to school is fleeting; he understands his position as an outsider and does not expect school to provide him any network of support or compassion. His eagerness to bond with Emmeline reveals the depth of his yearning. Fisher opens up to Emmeline first about his father’s abuse; he becomes a fixture at the resort that Emmeline’s adoptive parents run; and he is emotionally devastated when he realizes that Emmeline is keeping something from him. Her secret is like a corrosive substance to him, and it drives him to the city.

In the city, in his employment problems, Fisher reveals how he brings together the volatility of his father and the compassion of his mother. He loses both of his jobs when he intervenes and stands up for a woman he perceives to be under threat. He reveals a caring heart and a noble commitment to the ideals of protecting, not assaulting, the vulnerable. Fisher reveals a quiet moral and emotional maturity. Thus, his commitment to Emmeline, for all its joys and sorrows, is what Emmeline needs.

It is easy for readers to dislike Emmeline’s father once Emmeline learns the truth of her own background. Ruined in business and exposed as a quack, John fled bankruptcy and potential civil lawsuits and stole away his only daughter to hide on a remote island. As Emmeline struggles to understand, he is a liar, a failure, and a kidnapper. Emmeline’s coming of age narrative in Vancouver significantly adjusts this perception and ultimately answers the question of why her father leapt so carelessly off the bluff in an effort to preserve one of his bottles of scented paper.

Like his wife’s mercenary interest in Emmeline, John’s affection for his daughter is leavened by his own selfishness. He is a pure scientist, and he relies on his numbers-savvy wife to run the business end. He is devoted to his research to the point of an obsession; years on the island cause him to withdraw more and more from the daughter who needs him. The fairy tale world he so artfully constructs is his attempt to protect his daughter from a world he sees as toxic and destructive.

In throwing himself off the bluff, he was desperate to preserve the bottle because it contained the paper that held Emmeline’s scent as a baby. It was his way of preserving that wonderful, tonic memory. In the end, John is no fairy tale character, nor is he a villain easy to hate. Rather he is human, driven by motivations that are both loving and manipulative.