Fiction Olfactory

SCENT OF CLOVES (320 pp.)--Norah Lofh--Doubleday ($3.95).

There is only one thing remarkable about this book: it smells. Evidently in the belief that the practice of reading has become hopelessly discredited, Doubleday has tried the desperate expedient of dousing Scent of Cloves in some odorous compound that purports to be scent of cloves. Whether packs of osmophile readers will go like beagles into bookstores snuffing the spoor is questionable.

Scent of Cloves is a lady's view of the time of Cromwell, and if Cromwell had been a lady, the view might have been true enough. As it is, it tells a Cinderella story of little Julia Ashley, who is encountered competing with Irish pigs for some swill left behind by the Roundhead soldiery who laid Ireland waste. She grows up to be adopted by a dashing cavalier, farmed out to a Dutch orphanage and, in the natural course of events as they happen in female historical novels, mistress of a great plantation in the Dutch East Indies. Cloves is what they grow in the islands, hence the smell.

Granted that a heavy percentage of every publisher's seasonal list could well be doused with something or other, preferably Mum, this sort of thing nevertheless will deeply alarm all right-thinking (and right-smelling) readers. The precedent raises dreadful possibilities: a whiff of chloroform for Not As a Stranger, essence of unwashed T-shirt for On the Road and the odor of sanctity for The Power of Positive Thinking.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.