First Impressions
May We Feed the King is a really intriguing new kind of historical novel that quite surprised me. Going in, I'd seen a reader response saying it was difficult to follow, but I don't actually think that's true. I wonder if what that reader meant is that the novel deliberately withholds specificity and refuses to offer definitive answers, which can feel unsettling in its own way, but it serves a definite artistic and theoretical purpose in this novel. That was exactly what made it so enchanting, and I found myself completely intrigued by the details we are given.
A King With No Name
The novel follows a reluctant king from history who is never named. We get no character names, no dates, no country, though the setting is presumably medieval. What we do learn is that he came to the throne only because his two older brothers, both kings before him, died prematurely, making him the default heir. There's something almost absurd built into the very phrase used when a monarch dies, "the king is dead, long live the king," and the playwright Eugène Ionesco played on exactly that absurdity in one of his own plays. What it actually means, of course, is that the moment one monarch dies, the next person in line simply becomes king, as though kingship were an interchangeable role handed down a line, almost like selecting one apple from an anonymous barrel.
We're given plenty about this king's actions, his refusal to follow his council's advice, his reluctance to order executions or lead the country into war, his constant friction with a hated chief advisor who has likewise simply inherited his own role, but almost nothing about his interior life. We know he's deeply unhappy, doesn’t mind that his wife the queen is having an affair, that he barely eats and that he's essentially trapped. There's even a story of a previous king who abdicated outright, fled the palace, and was eventually caught throwing apples at the men sent to drag him back, earning him the nickname "the apple king." Our king is acutely aware that there's no real way out of his own situation, only this legend of a failed escape.
History, Curated
Alongside the king's story, the novel is bookended by a contemporary curator tasked with dressing the rooms of this same palace for a special event. She takes the job far more seriously than anyone around her expects, working with an archivist to dig into the palace's history and becoming completely engrossed in the king's story. Like the king, she's never named, but she has a real, almost fetishistic precision about which objects she selects and how she arranges them, wax apples included, believing that the right arrangement can let a visitor sense the history embedded in a room rather than just being told a flat set of facts.
I think it's very clever how Rebecca Perry builds such a strong sense of this king's identity without ever giving us direct access to his thoughts or feelings. Instead we get him only through side glances: what servants and councillors observe of him, the stories people tell about him, some possibly fabricated, possibly gossip, possibly politically motivated. That mirrors exactly how we receive history in general: we have to ask who's telling us a given story and what their motivations might be, because that shapes how we understand the facts we're given.
Judgment, Then and Now
There's a real, quiet tragedy at the center of this book: a man thrust into a role he never wanted, with no way out. And yet, he's just a king and privileged individual, exactly the sort history tends to remember over the ordinary people who lived decently and acted in small, unrecorded ways. But I think the novel's point extends well beyond monarchy. All of us are scrutinized, judged, and assumptions are made about us in ways we can't fully control, especially once we become any kind of public figure, and our own narratives can be told by others without our consent. Oddly, this made me think of Patrick Radden Keefe's recent book “London Falling” and the mystery surrounding the death of Zac, the nineteen-year-old at the center of that book, and how sympathetically Keefe reconstructs a story his grieving family still doesn't have full answers to. It also brought to mind Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, beginning with “Wolf Hall”, and the way she imaginatively fills in the interior lives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Cromwell himself, offering a new slant on history while still leaving room for readers to draw their own conclusions. Maggie O'Farrell's “The Marriage Portrait” does something similar with another real historical figure, Lucrezia de’ Medici, refusing to let the known facts limit the possibilities of her inner life. Rebecca Perry seems to be doing exactly that here, deliberately withholding names and dates so that history feels like an open field rather than a fixed timeline of accomplishments and failures.
A Puzzle Worth Solving
I found real pleasure in trying to piece together what was actually happening, in a way that felt almost like solving a puzzle where some interpretations land better than others. In the contemporary strand, there's a quietly building romance between the curator and the archivist, a growing attraction handled with real subtlety in the background. The novel also plays with different kinds of looking: tourists passing through the palace rooms today, courtiers and servants once watching the king, and, in one lovely touch, the king himself becoming a kind of tourist in his own home, wandering into the kitchens, asking how cinnamon cakes are made, and picking up an egg in its shell for what is the first time in his life, utterly struck by it. That layering of who's observing whom, and how the reader becomes another observer entering into all of it, kept the ambiguity alive without ever making the book feel murky or hard to follow.
There's a nice tension, too, in how the curator resists pressure from the palace's overseers, who just want the rooms dressed quickly and generically. She insists on arranging them as though a specific person from history had passed through only moments before, which raises exactly the questions the novel is interested in: what we can actually know about the past, what we can never know, and how much room there is to hold multiple honest possibilities about the same set of facts.
Verdict
I'm glad I got past my initial hesitation, which turned out to be based on nothing more than one secondhand reader reaction. This novel has been greatly well received this year: Rebecca Perry was named one of the year's best debut novelists, despite coming from a background in poetry rather than fiction, and while the prose itself isn't conspicuously lyrical, I think it could fairly be read as an extended prose poem. It won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize this year and has since been longlisted for the Booker, and I wouldn't be surprised if it goes further still. I found it a real pleasure, full of tantalizing details I'm still turning over. If you've read it, I'd love to know whether you agree with my read on it, or if there's more you'd want to raise about it.
