Rebecca Perry’s debut novel, May We Feed the King, reads exactly like what it is: a gorgeous, immaculate piece of prose written by a master poet. Moving back and forth between a modern-day estate and the unspecified medieval court that once ruled it, Perry provides sentences that are technically flawless, with the structural elegance of the world she builds being nothing short of breathtaking. It is certainly a stunningly ambitious book, but, for all its aesthetic brilliance and atmospheric depth, I felt as if Perry prioritised this sense of atmosphere and the historical details more so than anything else. So, while I ended up admiring the craftsmanship gone into the novel, I never really felt connected to the story.

We start the book off in the modern-day storyline, following an unnamed and nongendered museum curator who is hired to stage a 750th-anniversary exhibition for a historic palace. Their job is to source hyper-realistic replica food to breathe a sense of life back into long-abandoned rooms. However, this work seems to be more of an escape from a personal tragedy in their own life, one we are never disclosed the full details of, and that grief highlights what they notice in the archive. While digging through the records, the curator stumbles upon the forgotten history of an equally nameless King who inherited the throne by default after his older brothers died. Forced into power and suffocated by a bloodthirsty court, he describes being king as “a banshee wailing in his ear.”¹ The curator latches onto this suffering, using the sparse remnants of the king's life to craft the imagined tale of a ruler who never wanted to rule at all. The book’s narrative  moves through these three times: starting with the curator, then diving into the imagined story of the King, and finally returning to the modern day as the curator unveils their work to the public.

The Queen says that in her country it is said that not feeding the King is worse than starving the people.²

As Perry is first and foremost a poet, the narrative is built out of brief, episodic chapters that linger on sensory imagery rather than narrative momentum. To bridge the centuries, the curator obsesses over the physical details of the past, describing the food and banquet prep in dense paragraphs. At one point, she depicts replica potatoes so convincingly that you can practically feel the grit of dirt scratching against your teeth. While this prose is undeniably exquisite, it does come at a cost. The plot progression is regularly paused for us to stare at a waxen apple or a moulded piece of meat. We are invited to look at this world, but we are never, not even for a second, allowed to step inside of it. 

In all fairness to Perry, it did also feel as if the distance was almost certainly the entire point of the novel; being intentionally shown that the past can only ever be viewed from behind the rope. Yet, in interviews, Perry has stated she actually wanted readers to be fully immersed in this middle section, experiencing it as pure historical fiction. For me, that immersion just never happened. I wanted to be completely enamoured, hypnotised, and undone by this world, but the book kept pushing my hand away. My issue was that the narrative seemed to lack any major turning points or encounters that were reported after the fact rather than being dramatised in front of us. I felt quite stressed, certainly, but that is more so because I am chronically early to everything I go to and seeing the king leave such impactful decisions so last minute made my heart palpitate. Perhaps this critique leans more into being a personal slight than an issue of the book in its entirety, but I just found that I couldn't connect with it.

The court, the noble families, the Church, all the common people of the land—they are baby birds, mouths open and trembling for news of their new ruler.³

The most compelling part of the book is its focus on isolation and the erosion of identity that comes with public duty. Perry portrays a ruler who does not care to be seen as the perfect King, nor to be King at all. He is portrayed as a gentle soul, politically trapped and pressured by a bloodthirsty court to wage wars and sign execution orders. Their hunger seems to be primarily for state violence, while the King has absolutely no appetite for it at all. Even the act of eating itself becomes a royal obligation where the court watches and measures his appetite to see if he is fit to rule, because of course, “A King who doesn’t want to eat surely barely lifts a finger? [...] How will he master a horse, and swipe men down in battle, if he cannot tear meat from a bone?”⁴

The title itself, May We Feed the King, is a tad sneaky in showing this. Before I read the novel, I assumed it was a phrase born out of care or love. Now, having read the story, I realise that the title doesn't say "May we feed the man," or use his name. It uses the title of The King. He is reduced to a mouth that must be fed so that the kingdom itself can keep going above all else. ‘Feeding’ someone is inherently intimate, typically used in caring or protective situations. However, this is an adult monarch who has such immense power and authority, so the act of feeding him would be more humiliating than anything else. It assumes he is incompetent or child-like, not to be nurtured, but to be controlled. This unnamed King does have his own desires and wants in life, wants that, before his brothers died, were still entirely available to him. Now, suddenly, they are not. While I pitied the King’s entrapment, I found it so hard to root for such a passive character who simply gave up from the get-go. Instead of fighting back or trying to change his situation, he just shut down and let everything happen to him. Although, it is interesting to note that his characteristics may just be ones we don’t have access to. How much of what we read of the king is real, and how much is just the curator’s sympathetic imagining of him?

The transition from the King’s time to the modern era at the end of the novel felt undeniably abrupt. After spending the core of the book in the medieval world, being pulled back into the present day was a little sudden, less because I wanted to linger longer with the King, and more because it had me thinking, "Oh, okay, I guess we're done with that story now." I can, however, understand and accept why the narrative structure was built this way. The sudden shift drops you right into the curator's shoes, staring at the exhibit, knowing that the truth will never actually be known. The craftsmanship and intentionality of representation here is impressive, but not the most invigorating.

We rely so much—I’d say more than anything else—on what people took the time not just to write down, but to write to each other and to themselves.⁵

In the end, despite my lack of attachment to the book, I did take a lot away from it. May We Feed The King showed that, no matter how hard we try to talk with the past, that conversation is entirely one-sided. Just like future historians, we can never know what another human being was actually thinking or intending. History is a record shaped by those who had the power to write it down, the medieval court here demanded a very specific version of the king, and the surviving evidence reflected the role and the role alone that they forced him into. By the time the curator encounters him in the archives, she does not get to uncover a human being, just a king, and so, she cries  “What a reduction of a life”,⁶ a mirroring of the modern era where the curator's life is just as insulated, their interactions restricted to archives and artificial creations. This leads to, what I believe is, the novel's main takeaway: how a makeshift artificial object can only preserve a fragment of what the present has lost from the past. May We Feed the King, ultimately, suggests that while surviving evidence can be curated into a beautiful, flawless display, the raw reality of human intention is something that can never truly be salvaged.