Patrick Suskind’s 1985 novel Perfume is one of the 20th century’s best selling German novels, winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the PEN Translation Prize for the English edition by John Woods. It’s about an eighteenth century Parisian man, born with a superhuman sense of smell, and a lack of any normal moral sense. He will stop at nothing in his efforts to make the world’s greatest perfume.

I will tell you right away that this is a weird and dark book, its creepiness deriving from the fact that we are in the realm of smell. Smell, as I have learned with a bit of background reading, is the most ancient of senses, evolving from the primeval ability of early life forms to understand the chemical make-up of their environment.

A book set in an aromatic world is in tricky territory because reading is a visual, or auditory, experience. A ‘smell book’ would be very revealing in some ways, reaching places that the other senses could not, while also having the ability to trigger all sorts of emotions and memories. But the structure of the narrative would be all over the place. Smells linger and merge. Chapter one might not really end on its last page, but potentially persist into all the chapters that come after. And the last chapter could very well waft into the first. Also the book would be very short on thought and analysis. You smell things like manure and roses, not justice or the law. Old books smell, literature does not. We are talking something elemental here, which does not recognise abstractions. Smell is like an ancient world, which survives into the present day as a kind of Jurassic Park. Actually, the novel Perfume could be compared to that film – a fanciful portrayal of a reborn primeval force, sometimes beautiful, often scary and violent, with a terrifying T. rex central character who cannot be confined, despite the cheery confidence of Richard Attenborough. Very interesting, but approach with caution, and don’t expect to find the experience entirely pleasant.

The Story of the Lamp (and the Candle) is a history of artificial light, by F.W. Robins, published in 1939. I read the book as research for a novel I am writing which involves candles.

This book has a lot of detail about individual types of lamp and candle through the ages. But it’s also good on the big picture, of how fire and light have influenced human history. The evolution of technology, from pottery, metal work, and all other related crafts, to engines – whether that’s steam, internal combustion or rocket – through to the generation of electricity and everything that comes with it, derives from the control of fire. This breakthrough also had the effect of greatly expanding the time available for people to do things. Not much can be done in the dark, but people had the ability to turn night into day. Given the revolution this represents, it is not surprising that a veneration of fire and light has echoed down the centuries. The Story of the Lamp was very good at tracing these echoes. As just one example, the centre of ancient societies was the communal hearth. At some point someone discovered you could take a small portion of that light and heat into the surrounding darkness, in the form of a burning stick, which became a taper, then a candle; or it became a lamp, burning the fat that came from cooking, done on that same communal hearth. These separate flames could go off and wander about, even set themselves up in new communities, while always maintaining their link with the original fire. They were small parts of the whole. As just one example of the echoes that remain of this long lost primal camp fire, the epilogue suggests we think about the tradition of the Olympic flame, lit every five years at Olympia, and then taken off to wherever the Olympic Games has set up its new camp.

The Story of the Lamp shows how the present is a mirror of the past. All the aspects of our complex world can be traced back to people sitting next to a camp fire they managed to start and maintain. That is rather comforting. At the same time, the book serves as a reminder that ancient people saw danger in the seemingly miraculous gift that made their lives so much better and brighter. This fear was part of respect they felt for what they had been given. Maybe we could do with some of that

The Wall is a 2019 novel by John Lanchester, taking the rhetoric of Brexit to its metaphorical extreme by imagining a dystopian future where Britain is surrounded by a concrete wall. This barrier has a dual role, holding back both rising sea levels and migrants who are trying to escape climate disaster further south – known as Others in the book. The narrator is Kavanagh, a newbie wall guard, doing his obligatory national service.

The sections I found most interesting were the passages where Kavanagh is just hanging around on the wall. There isn’t much to do except think. We get some subtle sense that a wall is never a simple barrier between us and them. Who are we and who are they? Have a look at this short passage, for example, where Kavanagh thinks about his opposite number on the Wall duty roster:

When you came on shift you always hated the person you were relieving. The fact that you knew the other set of emotions so completely, that you knew exactly what the other person was feeling, made it worse. Your shift twin was a person you met twice a day, about whom you had very strong opinions, who you didn’t really know.’

In a way, the other you, your twin who does what you do for the twelve hours when you’re off duty is as unknown as the Others out there beyond the wall. Given a slight twist of fate you could easily exchange places with them. Maybe you are one of them already – as we see in the case of a senior officer on the Wall who used to be an Other.

There is a lot of that sort of thing. At one point we encounter a group of ruthless people who are really bad people, who act selfishly for nothing but their own gain. Are they truly the Others who we have to keep out, or are they a reflection of a people who refuse to help others on a national scale?

There is action in the book. It’s not all a young man hanging around thinking. But I would say the real action goes on inside Kavanagh’s head. Personally I would have had less action and more of Kavanagh mooching about. As Anthony Powell once wrote

“Action might have confused the issue by proving too exciting. Action is, after all, exciting rather than interesting.”

But that’s just me.

This book is an interesting reflection of its times, using a highly unsubtle, simple-minded caricature of an answer to national issues, to explore them in complex ways.

Brighton Rock is Graham Greene’s 1938 novel depicting gangland conflict in 1930s Brighton.

I’ve read that Graham Greene novels can be divided into ‘entertainment’ and ‘serious’. Brighton Rock seems to be included in the entertainment category. The plot involves a murder, the police messing up, a determined, amateur lady sleuth stepping in. The part-time lady sleuth idea goes back to Andrew Forrester’s Mrs Gladden character created in 1864, and had plenty of mileage in the 1930s with Miss Marple, Nancy Drew, Harriet Vane, and others.

If this is a familiar genre thriller, does that mean it can’t be a serious book? Graham Greene was a serious fellow. I think he saw himself as better than some workaday writer of detective fiction. If he was going to write a commercial lady detective story, he was going to use it to reflect on popular culture in general.

What is the popular outlook according to Brighton Rock? In broad outline, it involves an intense, black and white conception of right and wrong, combined with a tendency to emotive superstition, and a trust in ordinary people over experts. The amateur lady sleuth, Ida Arnold, is rigid in her judgements, thinks the police are incompetent fools, and uses seances to provide guidance and clues. So, there’s a scary sense of seeing the world in stark categories of good and bad, who’s in or out, all caught up in a vague wash of emotion and credulity. It’s a combination of the judgemental and a lack of anything substantive on which to base judgements.

Brighton Rock portrays a chaotic society, as strident as it is superficial. This all sounds painfully familiar. Does Greene provide any answers? Well no not really. The mob lawyer character, Prewitt, well educated, with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare, is as much part of this gritty milieu as the young mobsters. And talking of Shakespeare, it has been noted, not just by me, that Brighton Rock, as well as feeling like a violent Miss Marple story, is also reminiscent of something much more high end – Macbeth, no less. Ambitious young man commits murder and then gets pulled into more murder to cover it up. There doesn’t seem to be any meaningful divide between high and low brow in the world of Brighton Rock. Pinkie the young aspiring gangland boss even comes out with Latin phrases on occasion.

So does modern consumer culture swallow everything? That might be one way to look at it. The gang leader Pinkie is a Catholic, and even the ancient Catholic Church might become another expression of the popular outlook. After all, an intense, judgemental, black and white conception of right and wrong, combined with a tendency to emotive superstition, might not just apply to secular Ida and her seances.

I spent a long time thinking about this book, and had a few tries at writing a review. I suppose in the end I came to think of Brighton Rock as a prescient portrayal of how the popular can become the populist. That was certainly interesting. But the bleakness was a bit much. Popular culture isn’t necessarily rubbish. In his time Shakespeare was very much a popular playwright rather than an academic one. Then again maybe Greene would grudgingly agree, since he mixes high and low brow in the way he does. It’s not a gentle mixing, it’s like a scrapyard crushing a Rolls Royce with a Ford Fiesta and presenting a reader with the compacted result. But still, there is a lot to think about here as you look into the tangled mess of what was once Rolls Royce and Ford Fiesta.

The Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955, based on his experience as a war correspondent for the Times and Le Figaro.

British journalist Thomas Fowler has spent a few years in 1950s Saigon, reporting on the tangled mess of unravelling French colonial rule in Indochina. The story opens with some naive whippersnapper entering Fowler’s jaded, but oddly settled existence. Alden Pyle – young, American, Ivy League – turns up, apparently with all the answers to Vietnam’s problems. Pyle might lack practical experience, but he has read a book about foreign policy, and decides this qualifies him to wade into the morass of France’s struggle against various groups of Vietnamese resistance fighters, who also fight amongst themselves. Pyle’s plan is to direct American support to one of the Vietnamese factions, supposedly sympathetic to Western values, and allow this group to take over.

Fowler, meanwhile, is an observer, neutral, not taking sides, because that’s how a writer remains objective. A clergyman tells Fowler at one point, referring to his church:

“We are neutral here. This is God’s territory.”

This suggests that God and a weary British journalist have something in common. Fowler, however, thinks that maybe God should give up his position above it all and pick a side, preferably the side of scared, hungry people who take shelter in the church hoping to escape the fighting. Fowler, lacking Godly qualities, finds it increasingly difficult to stand idly by, as Pyle funnels resources towards a lawless, brutal warlord.

Fowler, the dispassionate writer is eventually forced to come down from his ivory tower, figuratively, and literally actually, since there is a tower in the book, a watch tower where he gets marooned with Pyle, when their car breaks down. The tower is attacked by the Vietnamese and collapses. Fowler finds himself back down on the ground, with a broken leg. This is where he, like all of us, has to make his imperfect judgements.

People are not omniscient. They are involved and subjective. Maybe we should conclude with the sort of religious metaphor characteristic of the book. People are perhaps in the position of Abraham in Genesis, when he tells God that some local perspective is lacking in the big picture judgement of the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah. Before raining down fire, brimstone and napalm for the greater good, there are a few decent people in those cities who should be considered along with all the rest. Don’t kill the innocent along with the guilty – and is it so easy to divide guilt from innocence anyway? Abraham presents the wisdom of his limited view to a superpower claiming to know everything. The Quiet American does the same. The difference, I suppose, is that God to an extent listens to Abraham, Pyle doesn’t listen to Fowler.