In Rebecca Perry’s Booker shortlisted May We Feed the King, a woman who suffers from a loneliness, its source purposefully kept fuzzy, is devoted to her remarkably niche work of reconstructing history through staged meals. The protagonist knows where to get the perfect plastic chicken leg, has a deep appreciation for a fake fish with the bright red beneath its gills. She is expert at her craft, confident and unbending in her approach when questioned.
This curator takes a commission to recreate “scenes,” as she calls them, in an historic castle. For accuracy, she requests for access to the archives. With the aid of the castle’s archivist, the speaker soon tips into the life of a Medieval king and his court (soon “my King”).
As her curiosity becomes all-consuming, so does the novel’s plot, and we are pitched into the intrigues of centuries ago. The King sits uneasily in his throne of power. His intimates are his attendant, his wife, his wife’s cousin.
Perry does a fabulous job of showing how rumors are conjured and subsequently fly from lips to ears again and again, how remarkable power casts a spell on those proximate. Was it a shadow in the window or was the King, his wife, and wife’s cousin engaging in a glorious threesome? Or the King merely sitting at his desk, head in hands, overwhelmed?
For anyone who is drawn to the portal archives can create, this all is fragrant of catnip. Perry is one of those rare writers who make what feels like (to this poet) the quantum leap between verse and literary fiction. Her language is simultaneously lush and stately, delivering just enough.
As when the king moves through his garden and regards “the perfection of the bleeding heart, its flowers dangling in an orderly line, juddering in the breeze.” The Booker judges describe how May We Feed the King is “a wonderfully enticing, and eye-opening, combination of themes, woven together with an extraordinary delicacy of touch.” My nightstand is piled high with books I have read and have yet to read. Every now and again it gets so out of control I have to take them all off and start again. When that happens, I swear I’ll keep the pile limited to a strict TBR, but it never happens.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
