The Lighthouse by Alison Moore is a novel of smells.
Perfumes figure strongly, as does camphor, with formaldehyde and octyl acetate making cameo appearances.
The lighthouse of the title is a model, a decorative, presentation container that once held a phial of perfume.
It was a present for a woman married to a chemist called Futh.
The chemist and the woman had a son (also called Futh because it is a surname), who also took up chemistry.
Futh the father was German and bored his wife, especially when talking about lighthouses.
She took off.
Futh the son is the novel's central character.
Futh the son kept the lighthouse long after its smelly associations had evaporated.
It became a son's memento of an almost mother.
A friend's mother who lived in the house across the fence at the end of the garden had odours of her own - and Venus flytraps.
Her husband had gone and she herself had a habit of entrapping boys, one of whom was her son.
Futh the younger has been married.
But she has gone as well, and we find him in reflective mood.
There is a need for a holiday, so he sets off to recreate a walk once completed by his father.
It's in Germany and he has to travel overseas on a ferry and stay a couple of nights in a small hotel.
Futh is not a practiced or successful traveller.
If it possible to get things wrong, he will.
He learns to drive late, and drives badly.
He and his wife never managed children, despite repeated pregnancies, all of which aborted.
A shop assistant gives him perfectly sensible advice about new boots bought specially for his walk, advice he chooses to ignore, to the detriment of his feet.
In the hotel he meets Esther, a beauty who has run a little to seed.
Her breasts are still impressive, however, as is her gin consumption.
She is married to Bernard.
Who is the one who smells of camphor.
She takes a liking top Futh's lighthouse.
He has decided for once to take it out of the pocket where he usually fondles it.
Esther caresses it, covets it.
Bernard's jealousy of his wife's proclivities is about to boil over.
After all, she really should have married his brother, until she changed her mind.
Futh gets sunburnt on his walking holiday, and pains of different kinds await when he returns to the hotel to be reunited with his precious lighthouse, which he thinks is still stashed away in his luggage.
Alison Moore's The Lighthouse works very hard at being enigmatic.
The immediacy of the present tense describes Futh's holiday, with past tense reminiscences peppering his present.
But somehow all of these people are eventually shallow, just too easily and willingly tempted into betrayal or rejection, states that never seem to prompt reflection or analysis.
They are all inlaid with their histories, but none of them seem to have learned anything from past mistakes, except the skill of repeating them.
Their inconstancy is too constant, their shared failings too predictable.
The Lighthouse is a well written and enjoyable read, but its pace is too even and its characters remain too distant.
It is as if we see these people from far away through a telescope, with the sounds they make fed via microphones to our headsets.
Everything is very plausible, except the people themselves, it seems.
Futh is thin and bald.
Esther is made-up and gone to seed.
Futh the father goes on about lighthouses when on a family holiday and bores his wife accordingly.
Futh the younger idolises his own lighthouse in his trousers.
Meanwhile, everyone thinks about sex and most end up disloyal.
The Lighhouse goes up and down, flashes on and off.
It's a single dimension in other ways as well.