Base Notes, by Lara Elena Donnelly
A noir thriller with a single but crucial non-realistic element, which is that the narrator, Vic, can create perfumes which evoke memories. I say non-realistic because it’s not done with either magic or non-existent technology: Vic uses real methods of making perfume, and gets unreal results. The rules are consistent: the perfume only works on the person whose memory it is, and the memory has to involve a person who must be killed and used as an ingredient.
Vic owns an avant-garde perfumery, inherited via murdering the previous owner and making him into a perfume, and mostly does non-murdery, non-memory perfumes and runs the murder/memory business as a side gig. Unfortunately, when your side gig involves committing major crimes for terrible rich people, you are liable to end up in the exact sort of situation that Vic ends up in: blackmailed into committing multiple murders in the hope of creating a perfume that accesses other people’s memories—something which probably isn’t possible. To make the situation even more difficult, a private eye suspects and is following Vic for a previous perfume murder.
Vic decides that this situation needs accomplices—one to commit each murder—and selects three potential helpers, each of whom has been personally wronged by one of the prospective victims…
A confident, gripping novel, reminiscent in content of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, in tone of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Brian D’Amato’s Beauty, and in themes of all of them: obsession, murder, unreliable narrators, social satire, social climbing, and the drive for some kind of transcendence that destroys everything it touches.
If you want a novel about perfume to involve perfume and smells in general, this delivers: there’s a cast of characters listed by how they smell, each chapter has an epigraph of its keynote smells, and Vic has an extraordinarily good sense of smell and tells you what everything smells like. Vic is a completely terrible person (most of the characters are completely or at least largely terrible) but I enjoyed following them for the length of a novel.
I’m mostly avoiding pronouns for Vic as I’m not totally sure what they are. I personally think Vic is transmasc but again, not actually stated.
The supporting characters are classic noir types, updated and fleshed out and placed in a very specific New York City social context. The male patsy is a tailor by occupation and a sub by preference, in a poly relationship with the steely, ruthless woman who’s a photographer/bartender desperate to pay off his medical debt but alarmingly prompt to agree to murder as a way of doing it. The ground-down idealist is a barber about to get priced out of his shop.
Like Vic, they’re artists getting slowly crushed under late capitalism, but seen from a more jaundiced than idealistic perspective. Vic knows that artists needing patrons is not a new issue, and is willing to toss them and their art under the bus if it serves their ends. Vic gets involved with the poly couple and has some real feelings for them, but then again, the last person Vic was in a serious relationship with got turned into perfume.
This isn’t a comedy by any means, but there’s a strong element of deadpan absurdity and black humor running through it. The cast of characters, listed by what they smell like, has several puzzling elements which become clear late in the book, and I actually did laugh out loud when I realized what was going on.
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Like the other books Base Notes reminds me of, it’s more compelling in the first two-thirds. I’m more interested in the rise than the climactic fall, and more interested in the building of relationships than the breaking of them. It’s a bit over-long, which doesn’t help. The characters tend to be overly trusting at the wrong moments to facilitate the murders happening. But overall, it was very enjoyable.
Base Notes is a modern noir with several unusual twists, and it’s generally done very well. Donnelly is the author of the Amberlough series, which I haven’t read.
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Vic owns an avant-garde perfumery, inherited via murdering the previous owner and making him into a perfume, and mostly does non-murdery, non-memory perfumes and runs the murder/memory business as a side gig. Unfortunately, when your side gig involves committing major crimes for terrible rich people, you are liable to end up in the exact sort of situation that Vic ends up in: blackmailed into committing multiple murders in the hope of creating a perfume that accesses other people’s memories—something which probably isn’t possible. To make the situation even more difficult, a private eye suspects and is following Vic for a previous perfume murder.
Vic decides that this situation needs accomplices—one to commit each murder—and selects three potential helpers, each of whom has been personally wronged by one of the prospective victims…
A confident, gripping novel, reminiscent in content of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, in tone of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Brian D’Amato’s Beauty, and in themes of all of them: obsession, murder, unreliable narrators, social satire, social climbing, and the drive for some kind of transcendence that destroys everything it touches.
If you want a novel about perfume to involve perfume and smells in general, this delivers: there’s a cast of characters listed by how they smell, each chapter has an epigraph of its keynote smells, and Vic has an extraordinarily good sense of smell and tells you what everything smells like. Vic is a completely terrible person (most of the characters are completely or at least largely terrible) but I enjoyed following them for the length of a novel.
I’m mostly avoiding pronouns for Vic as I’m not totally sure what they are. I personally think Vic is transmasc but again, not actually stated.
The supporting characters are classic noir types, updated and fleshed out and placed in a very specific New York City social context. The male patsy is a tailor by occupation and a sub by preference, in a poly relationship with the steely, ruthless woman who’s a photographer/bartender desperate to pay off his medical debt but alarmingly prompt to agree to murder as a way of doing it. The ground-down idealist is a barber about to get priced out of his shop.
Like Vic, they’re artists getting slowly crushed under late capitalism, but seen from a more jaundiced than idealistic perspective. Vic knows that artists needing patrons is not a new issue, and is willing to toss them and their art under the bus if it serves their ends. Vic gets involved with the poly couple and has some real feelings for them, but then again, the last person Vic was in a serious relationship with got turned into perfume.
This isn’t a comedy by any means, but there’s a strong element of deadpan absurdity and black humor running through it. The cast of characters, listed by what they smell like, has several puzzling elements which become clear late in the book, and I actually did laugh out loud when I realized what was going on.
( Read more... )
Like the other books Base Notes reminds me of, it’s more compelling in the first two-thirds. I’m more interested in the rise than the climactic fall, and more interested in the building of relationships than the breaking of them. It’s a bit over-long, which doesn’t help. The characters tend to be overly trusting at the wrong moments to facilitate the murders happening. But overall, it was very enjoyable.
Base Notes is a modern noir with several unusual twists, and it’s generally done very well. Donnelly is the author of the Amberlough series, which I haven’t read.
[image error] [image error]
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