On a bookshelf near my desk, I have a painting by the artist Caroline Gorick. Her work captures images of light seen through household objects, like lamps, in impressionistic monochrome oil. She turns something mundane and definite into something beautifully indistinct. In her Booker-longlisted novel May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry has made an attempt at the same, but through words—a grasping for splendid ambiguity in the ruins of specificity. She achieves a reverence for the power of things unresolved.
Using (and not using) moments of touch, small objects, and the intimate experiences of a life, Perry recreates the spectacular unclarity of living, of being in the world, and makes it into an argument for bringing that realism into stories. Yet she does so by pointedly deviating from realism in her own work—a delightful piece of playfulness in a story that proves full of them.
Perry’s novel contains a first-person framing narrative, in which a woman undertakes a commission to set up scenes in a historical building for a notable anniversary weekend, and an inset narrative in the third person following the king from whose life she is drawing her inspiration to craft said tableaux. The two narratives are distinct not just in their choice of person, but in their voices, tones, and atmospheres, in the elements they choose to fore- or background. This creates a book with two quite disjointed parts, but with flourishes of language and motif which draw enough parallels in between them to keep their relationship clearly in view, too.
In the opening narrative, the unnamed narrator talks about her passion for her work—how she began in it, what draws her to it—and ladens down the text with descriptions of the sensory. Specifically, she goes into detail about the types of replica food available on a specific website, their qualities, their problems, the weight and feel of them in the hand, their purpose to her work. She is especially concerned with texture. I find that, in reading works with this kind of focus on physical description, the ones especially that are deeply embedded in a single character’s mind and perspective (as this one is), sensation can be a proxy for “truth” within the narrative. In these kinds of work, there’s the world of thought, there’s the complex and the metaphorical, but when the text descends into lingering passages on how a cushion cover feels, it’s often about providing a contrasting “realness” as a counterpoint to the more abstract aspects of the story. This becomes incredibly fun in this particular book, because all of this sensory obsession is turned specifically towards facsimile—there is no truth to be found in the textures this character lingers over, again and again. Here, the sensory is instead about the production of falsehood, but also a falsehood within which touch is supposed to be absent: She is creating scenes that are for viewing only, placed behind ropes, things whose nature would be betrayed if someone were to pick up the apple from the fruit bowl and find it hollow and light. And so, a list of fake fruit is not simply a cigar.
This is something that, in the abstract, sounds like it might be strange and tedious to read, yet something in the way Perry goes about it here is anything but. Precisely because of that sensory focus, I think, she turns this enumeration into a deeply immersive reading experience, embedding the reader’s perspective into that of the narrator’s expertise. This becomes particularly fitting when her discussion of her work becomes itself about crafting the act of immersion for both herself and the viewer of her scenes. As this section goes on, it becomes clear that the obsession with immersion this character has springs from darker causes, alluded to but never fully revealed, and that the immersion she so desperately seeks is the sublimation of the self into another world, another life, another way of being in the world.
Hold on to that thought, because we’ll be coming back to it.
The second, inset, narrative has two perspectives, a young attendant’s and a king’s. Neither are named. The previous king is dying a lingering death and this new one must take his place. The new king, it swiftly transpires, does not want the kingship. His narrative is an extended meditation on both his deep unhappiness in his role and his desire to (quite literally) abdicate it and return to his lost previous life. He puts up stiff resistance to those matters presented as requirements of kingship—especially state violence.
Building off the framing narrative, then, the king’s section is very concerned with the performance of a role, with the sublimation of the self into a duty—and, conversely, with the yearning for the self that is lost when all the world tries to enforce the role at every turn. Yet, despite what might be expected of an historical narrative given the academic nature of the original narrator’s role, it is surprising how unhistorical the king’s section is. At first, this is just a lack of specificity—what historical building are we in, what country, what time period, what king is this? None of these questions are answered. But the uncertainty grows into ahistoricality: details, when given, don’t fully make sense for any real place or time. The figures within the narrative beyond the king and the attendant seem to be no more than caricatures and tropes, the Senior Advisor playing the evil Grand Vizier with aplomb. If this isn’t history, and it isn’t realism either, what is it instead? The section never quite resolves into something specific, dancing in between the historical and the fantastical while refusing to commit to either.
Indeed, this is a story in which immersion and its absence are constantly in play, and in fact become the major tools the author uses both to illustrate her wider thematic argument and to just play, in a way that is delightful to read in the moment. Through a constant, skilful use of dissonance and contrast—the echoing of motifs through these two distinct narratives—Perry creates out of incoherence a beautifully coherent whole, a story that delights in being multiple things. In doing so, she reminds us of the value of multiplicity, of ambiguity, of openness to interpretation. May We Feed The King may be misread, if such a thing is possible; but in the open spaces where that opportunity lives there is more space for joy and wonder for me than exists in any narrative pinned down and dissected like a butterfly under glass.
Where the framing narrative is rich in specific, grounding detail, enamoured of touch, the inset narrative is full of blur, its descriptions vague: clothing is only ever one amorphous thing, maybe a colour, maybe a large skirt, but with none of the richness of detail that would be the norm for a more typical historical narrative. Where the sensory comes into play, it is not touch but instead the more ineffable smell, and often vague: a scents might be rosemary, might be earth, and usually evoke memories more than they suggest the presence of something physical.
Likewise, what description there is tends to pull instead back to that overarching theme of immersion, of self and role, and to the king’s emotional arc. This section is replete in imagery of absences—there are plant beds described as bare gums, the absent bushes the gaps where teeth ought to go, there are many gaping mouths, dark earthy holes for bulbs to be planted, and silences. There is very little dialogue, and it is often delivered piecemeal, either in fragmentary sentences or with the speaker left unclear. The whole piece keeps on returning to the kingship as an absence that the new king is destined to fill, is needed to fill—for the country, for the people, for simply reality. The advisors want to erase his self, to force his immersion into this role, and the king can neither fully succeed or successfully reject them. He remains trapped in the in between space of a kingship unfulfilled.
Yet in the frame narrative, the experience of the protagonist is one of becoming lost in the stories into which she escapes. The two protagonists, then, are each other’s opposite—the narrator is desperate for the sort of erasure of self that is being thrust upon him, and the king for the reality of experience that she is so quick to abandon.
The story is constantly shifting between flow and pause, between the immersive and the thoughtful, and trying to hold a place in between the two where something interesting might live in the interplay. Perry is playing with liminality, persistently providing active break points in her story which force the narrative to a stop and create spaces to encourage reflection, returning back out to one’s own perspective. This interplay of immersion and break ensures that the sense of a real time and place in which the king’s section takes place becomes ever less graspable, just as the emotional stakes of his despair become ever more palpable—and the dissatisfaction of those around him becomes ever more threatening.
And then it all comes to a strange kind of crescendo: The king’s narrative ends, the story returns to the first narrator, but the conclusion is one that absolutely resists full understanding. What happens to the king, and what comes after him, is left explicitly vague. There is no catharsis to his story, and no message that would result from a clear resolution. Was he right to resist ordering violence? Was he wrong to indulge his unhappiness in his role rather than accepting the necessity of his part in the system? The story again has no answers; it is up to the reader to provide them, and to define the terms by which the characters might be measured. Is this a tragedy about how certain roles force one to abandon one’s own life? Is this a cautionary tale about hereditary rulership? A cynical exploration of the human tendency to scheme and yearn for power when a gap is presented? Maybe. I found my own answers in the gaps, but the joy of the story was in presenting me with the opportunity to wallow in the possibilities.
The latter part of the framing narrative is concerned with an open day at the still-unspecified historical site, in which the narrator—who has been increasingly under pressure from management for her idiosyncratic working practices, her delays and her vagueries—explains to the general public a little about her work, and about history. Delighting in contrast as the story has throughout, this is where vagueness flips to specificity, and where the narrator delivers an incisive argument for the productive necessity of uncertainty. The narrator speaks to the impossibility of fixed knowledge, of the ever-presence of doubt and change in history, the impermanence of it all as each new person may bring a new coda to a story, the idea of history as an ongoing project with no end, and whose benefits are as many as those who both perpetrate and consume it.
Speaking of that unnamed, non-specific king, she says:
His great gift to us … is the very lack of an ending, that could drive a historian mad. What a great – pardon my language – “fuck you” to everyone who tries to manhandle ambiguity into order.
I cannot help but read this as an argument not just about history (though it is that, and one I salute), but about stories more broadly, and about the similarity between the two. Increasingly, I find a lot of stories—I notice this more in SFF where I read most broadly, but I don’t want to complain that the genre is unique in this regard—strive ever away from ambiguity, determined to have clearer and clearer arguments, to become more resistant to misinterpretation. Perry’s clarion call here, then, is a balm. The king’s story, and the narrator’s, lack the precision of message, the clarity that fears the unkind read or the disputed position. Instead, Perry embraces one of the most powerful storytelling tools available—letting the reader find their own way amid the mess, abandoning the need to explain and adopting instead the joy of experience.