It’s likely that you’ll either be utterly intrigued or deeply put off by that summary of poet Rebecca Perry’s debut novel, May We Feed the King, a highly wrought puzzle-box of a book which deliberately wrongfoots the reader at every turn. However, the intrigued will find that it richly rewards those who approach it with curiosity – just not in the ways we as readers (and as interpreters of stories in any form) have been trained to expect ... May We Feed the King is made up of glimpses of scenes from odd angles and perspectives, with confounding reflections, shadows and movements: rooms seen through windows or from doorways, conversations half heard. It is as though we, not the long-dead courtiers, are the ghosts, as we creep around the palace peering into its rooms dressed in careful set-pieces, trying to interpret complex and momentous events from the few clues left behind ... the novel asks us to admit that we can know almost nothing about history, or even about the lives of people with whom we live contemporaneously. To read May We Feed the King is to be richly entertained but forced to sit with frustration: we want clues, we want certainty, we want a story about the King that makes sense, and Perry withholds it, instead making us watch our own minds scrabble about, compulsively putting together the scattered pieces of the past.
As the King refuses to behave like one — i.e., to hassle, tax or slaughter anybody — Perry deftly evokes the court’s descent into confusion and paranoia in the absence of executive agency ... This is a work of historical fiction that is about fiction, and storytelling. The King’s reluctance to act — that is, to become a character — turns his reign into a narrative without plot. Robbed of any privacy, he is watched at all times, by the reader as well as by his subjects, observed through a window or a crack in a storage trunk, as though we are spying on him from within ... When we return from this medieval interlude to the present day, the curator asks the reader how we understand what we just read. 'How do we know anything about history?' she asks of an audience of 40 people who’ve come to see the palace exhibit. What is recorded of the past is only ever partial, she argues, revealing more about the teller than the subject.
In the tradition of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Perry explores scholarly obsession, questioning how far it is possible for us to make contact with the past. But through her curator, this contact becomes stranger, more physical, embodied in the scenes she is staging ... In Rebecca Perry’s novel, we witness two kinds of resurrection: that found in the art of fiction and that found in the art of curation, both bringing the dead vividly back to life.
A poet shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, Perry suffuses her prose with the kind of lyricism you’d expect from her ('a fresh day, like cutting into an apple'; bodies 'like slugs on young plants after rain'), reveling in the cloying materiality of this historical feast for the senses. But Perry’s project is also to question the fickle nature of storytelling itself, keeping her characters at arm’s length in a way that is deliberately unsatiating. Even if Perry’s work sometimes opts for style over substance, this is a taut and assured first novel which surely marks the beginning of an eminent novel-writing career.
May We Feed the King contains a lot of sumptuous writing about sex and desire, and the sentences can be spellbinding and stirring. But the sensibilities of the characters feel modern and the novel reads more like a dream or a fairytale than a depiction of a particular period. This is mishmash medievalism rendered in short sentences and snappy chapters with striking titles (Pussy, for example). Perry is a TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet and her novel...prioritizes poetic imagery, sensations and atmosphere over narrative, portraiture or historical inquiry. The vibes are strong, but it never quite approaches the domain of the real. Then again, perhaps that’s entirely appropriate. What Perry is interested in is interrogating our ideas of monarchy.
Its details exquisite and its silences significant, Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King is a lyrical, commanding novel about the beauty hiding in the white spaces of history.
May We Feed the King is lyrical and rich, but despite its poetic chapter titles and artistic observations, it bears the marks of a novelist’s intricate plotting and sense of pace ... Perry captures the players of the court and the chain of gossip so successfully it feels as though we are observing history as it plays out. But what the book has to say about whether we can trust historical texts and records, and the propaganda they might inadvertently contain, is far more interesting.
With competently evocative writing and a fine turn of phrase...Perry entices us to watch events dispassionately, much as secret observers might, slowly revealing the underlying mystery, even the inklings of a love story. I endeavor not to repeat my comments in reviews, but for this I’ll make an exception. Remarkable.
