There is a moment early on in May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry where the narrator is in a supermarket, unable to decide what she can bear to eat. She picks up a whole chicken, and afterwards her hand is tacky, and she keeps opening and closing her fist to test the stickiness. She buys bananas, sees that one has split down its stomach, and puts the whole bunch back because of what might now be inside.
Then she queues, and in front of her a baby is asleep in a pram with a vacuum-packed rack of ribs resting against its bare leg. The red juice under the plastic makes a network of lines over the veins in the meat. And she feels she has to touch the parent’s arm and say: please move that away from your baby, or something bad will happen.
I knew by then that I was in extremely good hands.
The Setup Rebecca Perry Gives You
Our narrator has no name. For twenty-two years she has done a job I did not know existed: she dresses the rooms in historic houses. The banquet nobody will eat. The nun’s cell with its one stub of candle. The space behind the red rope where an open book and a picked-apart loaf are quietly telling you about somebody who has stepped out.
She is commissioned by a palace for an anniversary nobody can actually justify, and in its archives she finds a king. He gets one page in the ledger, scrawled over for centuries by people determined to record his shame. She cries when she reads it. Then she sets out to reassemble the man from the wreckage of it.
The second half of May We Feed the King is that world. And this is where Rebecca Perry does the thing that made me sit up.
Rebecca Perry Writes Two Books That Turn Out to Be One
For a while I thought I was reading two novels stapled together. A contemporary one about a woman and her strange profession, and a historical one about a court where a third brother is unwillingly made King after both his brothers die.
They are the same book, and the join is almost invisible.
The court chapters keep being framed like this: someone looking in through a crack in the door would see. Someone at the window would see. Someone hiding in the trunk in the corner, catching a sliver of the room, would see.
Which is exactly how you look at a museum scene. From a fixed spot, through a doorway, over a rope. Rebecca Perry never once nudges you about it. She just builds the whole medieval half as an installation and lets you work it out.
The King
He is the best thing here. A man who was never in line, who was allowed to be odd, who describes himself as not the wood or the worm but the hole that speaks of its presence.
What he wants is dirt. Alone in his rooms, supposedly praying, he sweeps ash from the fireplace to get grit under his fingernails. He puts a finger in his nostril just to feel it. And he wipes the crust from his cat’s eyes with his thumb and smells her breath, and holds her the way he has seen parents hold babies, and the court decides he has gone mad for want of an heir.
He and his Queen love each other and have never been lovers. Her lover is the assistant physician, and the only favour the King ever asked of his dying brother was rooms where the two of them could live together privately. I found that so unexpectedly moving I had to stop.
And what he does, across entire May We Feed the King, is refuse. He will not sign. He will not send the army. And he will not be counselled. The council read it first as defiance, then as cowardice, and it is neither.
Where It Falters
Two things, and one is barely a complaint.
The court has no name, no country, no date. That gives it the clean air of a fable and it also means there is nothing to grip. I liked it. I can see somebody else finding it weightless.
The harder one: the chapters are extremely short, sometimes four lines, and for the first fifty pages the book feels like a beautiful notebook rather than something with a shape. It does acquire a shape. It acquires a magnificent one. But I can imagine people putting it down before it arrives, and that would be a shame.
What Rebecca Perry Will Not Say
You learn almost nothing about her loss. It is referred to as certain things that had happened, and my past life, and the table where we used to sit. Someone is dead. She never tells you who and Rebecca Perry never makes her.
At first I thought Rebecca Perry was withholding for effect. She is not. Her entire job is reading a room for what is missing, and the novel does to us exactly what she does to a visitor: gives us the objects and refuses the caption.
By the last section, which is nothing but descriptions of the six finished scenes, you are doing her job. A gap in a neat row of medicine bottles. Execution papers half consumed by a fire, with the crucial name eaten away. A mound of fruit that is one piece short.
I read that section twice.
If You Finished ‘May We Feed the King’ and Need Something Else
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa is the other recent short novel that reorganised my head this thoroughly. The Glutton by A.K. Blakemore covers historical appetite and the body brilliantly, and Perry thanks her in the acknowledgements. And Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is the closest cousin for sheer restraint. If you want the other side of the same longlist, our review of The End of Everything covers the book that withholds even harder and is far colder about it.
Where It Leaves You
Near the end she gives a public talk and tells her audience about a man who made resin models of 286 kinds of apple that grew in Italy in the 1800s, and that we know those apples existed only because of him. Then she asks what the models cannot tell us. Somebody says: what they tasted like.
The archivist, who cannot help themselves, says the models were made so that one day we would have to confront what we have lost.
That is the book. A woman builds the most careful possible replica of a man erased from the record, because she cannot build one of the person missing from her own house. Nothing is recovered. Something is honoured.
Rebecca Perry has written a debut, May We Feed the King, about the ethics of speaking for the dead, and about walking away from a throne, and about fake pies. It should not work. It is the best-made book on this longlist and I think it is going to stay with me for years.
On the last page she sets a bowl of fruit on her own table and deliberately leaves one apple out, to the side, for somebody else to put in place. Reader, I made a noise.