The Secret of Scent Luca Turin Faber & Faber, 207pp, £12.99 ISBN 0571215378

I didn't skip a word in this book, not even on the second reading, not even CC1CC(C)(C)C2=CC(C)=C(C=C2C1(C)C)C(C)=O, which, in the chemical language of SMILES, is the word for a molecule that exudes a scent of cheap musk for 30 hours - what the perfume industry calls a bottom or drydown note. Turin briefly explains SMILES, as he explains many things in his narrative of osmic sciences, including the polarograph and the Jaklevic-Lambe easily realised electron tunnelling spectrometer. In so doing, he gives his readers a chance to test what he calls "the Paragraph Rule" - his belief that every science textbook has one paragraph "where the style of the author matches exactly one's style of understanding, and which we then grasp properly and permanently".

I think I understood the paragraphs in which Turin connected semi-conductors, electron tunnelling and the biological spectroscope in living beings that can instantly identify a particular molecular vibration as a potential mate from a matching insect species or Guerlain's 1962 Chant d'Arômes, a floral lactonic suggesting peachy skin. At least, I understood them for about as long as a bottom note lasts, after which the jiggling quantum mechanical universe Turin enthusiastically describes diffused his metaphors.

That's a high success rate, though, given the multiple difficult tasks he has set himself in this slim volume. In essence, it's a general-reader narrative of the biophysical-chemical cross-disciplinary connections the author had to make to assemble his vibratory olfactory theory, much disputed on publication. To tell that story in popular language, Turin has to sketch in basic molecular chemistry and a century of breakthroughs in apparently unrelated scientific fields, with nothing but a few blobby diagrams to make his words more manifest. This sequence of instruction is rather like the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, but without the demonstrations: it would be more graspable if we could all rush to a gas chromatograph as a peak puff of perfume component exited its tubes.

However, the lectures are only part of Turin's blend and, despite their importance, not the most interesting ingredients. The book also outlines a brief history of the synthesis of perfumery materials at a molecular-chemical level - for example, Albert Baur's 1888 attempts to brew explosives based on trinitrotoluene (TNT). The tertiary-butyl derivative was useless as a big bang, yet lingered sweetly on the skin, supplying the same scent as extract of deer, rock-badger urine and Algerian gazelle droppings, at a thousandth of the cost. Musk Baur, as it was called, the father of all nitro-derived musk ambrettes, is now banned in the west because of allergic reactions.

"Personally, I'd risk scrofula to have my old Brut back," writes Turin, introducing the third, and best, element of this book: his scientific adventurousness and unique concordance with perfume. Turin doesn't want to overlap with Chandler Burr's biography of him, The Emperor of Scent, so he confines the personals to vignettes of a vagrant life in science, the proposals and modest sponsorships that allowed him to research in aggregate over time.

He encounters the Russian command economy, which could afford to commission translations of thousands of scien-tific studies into dozens of languages, from the piles of which in a Moscow bookshop he collaged his knowledge of solid-state physics. He describes people and places subtly, especially the Osmothèque museum, in the basement of the perfume school in a Paris suburb, where he went to experience a legendary perfume dating from 1881. I have a feeling that the direct power of his interaction with odours allows him to exist at such times in greater depth than the rest of us. His evocations of scents draw on anything and every-thing - music, taste, colour, shape, sense of humour - and he apprehends chords of meaning in harmony with those very specific vibrations. That 1881 perfume, Fougère Royale, Turin divines wickedly, used quantities of new-minted coumarin. In it, he first detected the austere cleanliness of tiles and towels; then a touch of natural civet, the most uncleanly flux of an Asian cat. "We're in a bathroom! The idea here is shit . . . at a distance he who wears it is everyone's favourite son-in-law; up close a bit of an animal."

Turin knows the unwritten history encoded in perfumes, too, such as the 1903 separation of the isomers of methyl ionine, which eventually produced so many shelves of violet fragrances that we still dismiss the smell as cheap. How can you not love a scientist who writes respect-fully of the terse haiku produced on strict budgets by functional perfume chemists, especially the Basho masterpiece that was the 1972 fabric softener Stergene?

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website