In a medieval palace an unnamed king chafes under the new and unsought burden of power. His uncertain fate plays out in the present-day imagination of an unnamed curator of unspecified gender, who has been employed by the palace to dress some of its rooms for public viewing in the wake of an undescribed personal tragedy.
It’s likely that you’ll either be utterly intrigued or deeply put off by that summary of poet Rebecca Perry’s debut novel, May We Feed the King, a highly wrought puzzle-box of a book which deliberately wrongfoots the reader at every turn. However, the intrigued will find that it richly rewards those who approach it with curiosity – just not in the ways we as readers (and as interpreters of stories in any form) have been trained to expect.
The book opens directly into the airless and unemotional life of the Curator as they visit the historic house to take up a new commission. “When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an old building, I am the person who placed the pomegranates beside the pie, and for very good reason,” they explain. We are initiated into a world in which historically accurate foodstuffs can be ordered online – “a half oyster shell, the exposed flesh shining as if with the freshest brine, is £31.25 for a single piece” – and begin to understand one of the most striking things about this novel: its insistence upon detail, its utter specificity, set against a deliberate lack of specificity regarding the larger details that the reader’s mind naturally itches to fill in. We are told everything – and nothing at all.
Soon, the Curator meets the Archivist, keeper of the medieval palace’s historical records, and in those records finds mention of the brief reign of a king whose life the Curator will draw on to create their historical scenes. We are not told exactly what the records show, but the Curator does report their reaction: “It’s important to say that I cried, I wept, when I saw it. What a reduction of a life.” Although third in line, and temperamentally unsuited to rule, it seems that this king assumed the throne reluctantly after the death of both his brothers, then refused to govern. At this point, the narrative slips into the world of the King, his Queen, his hated Chief Adviser, a loyal young Attendant and the wider world of the court, the novel swallowing up the Curator and we readers like a mirrored jewel box and holding us there, dazzled by the richness of its details and, like the King, quite unable to find our way out.
Perry’s poetry has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. She has also published an essay in book form about trampolining – growing up, she competed nationally and internationally – and it doesn’t feel like a stretch to point out that in this book the views we are granted are often brief and strangely tilted, never quite stable. May We Feed the King is made up of glimpses of scenes from odd angles and perspectives, with confounding reflections, shadows and movements: rooms seen through windows or from doorways, conversations half heard. It is as though we, not the long-dead courtiers, are the ghosts, as we creep around the palace peering into its rooms dressed in careful set-pieces, trying to interpret complex and momentous events from the few clues left behind.
The King is given ultimate power – he can start wars, launch fleets, have subjects killed at a word – and yet its exercise requires total personal surrender: “the King sees an apple he would like to pick and someone is called to free it from the branch”. His growing misery is that of someone raised as a subject who has objecthood forced upon him, and we sympathise with his quiet and then not-so-quiet rebellion as he seeks to escape his plight. More widely, the novel asks us to admit that we can know almost nothing about history, or even about the lives of people with whom we live contemporaneously. To read May We Feed the King is to be richly entertained but forced to sit with frustration: we want clues, we want certainty, we want a story about the King that makes sense, and Perry withholds it, instead making us watch our own minds scrabble about, compulsively putting together the scattered pieces of the past.
Towards the end of the book we are returned to the present day and the world of the Curator as they dress the scenes and invite the public in to view their work. “His great gift to us,” they tell the assembled audience, speaking of the King, “– or at least it has been a gift to me – 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, to knock out the air.” And then they release the crowds into the rooms with a final instruction that made me wonder if my two close readings of the book were sufficient, if in fact there might have been a clue that I’d missed: “Listen for everything and, above all, pay attention.”
• Melissa Harrison’s fourth novel, The Given World, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in May. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
