Can We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry – A Dazzling Puzzle Box Debut | imaginary

IIn a medieval palace, an unnamed king chafes under the weight of new and unwanted power. His uncertain fate is embodied in the present-day fantasy of an anonymous curator of unspecified gender, hired by the palace to plaster some of its rooms for public display in the wake of an unspeakable personal tragedy.

You’ll probably either be completely fascinated or deeply disturbed by this summary of poet Rebecca Berry’s debut novel, Can We Feed the King, an overly ornate puzzle box of a book that deliberately misleads the reader at every turn. However, those who are fascinated will find that it rewards those who approach it with great curiosity—but not in the ways that we as readers (and interpreters of stories in any way) have been trained to expect.

The book opens directly into the airless, unsentimental life of a curator as he visits the historic house to take on a new assignment. “When you see a replica feast scene in the great hall of an ancient building, I’m the one who put the pomegranate next to the pie, and it’s for a very good reason,” they explained. We have entered a world where historically accurate food items can be ordered online – “an oyster half-shell, the exposed flesh glistening as if with fresh brine, at £31.25 apiece” – and we begin to understand one of the most surprising things about this novel: its insistence on detail, its absolute specificity, in the face of a willful lack of specificity regarding the larger details that the reader’s mind naturally yearns to fill in. We are told everything – and nothing at all.

Soon after, the curator meets the archivist, the keeper of the historical records of the medieval palace, and in those records finds mention of the short reign of the king whose life the curator will draw upon to create their historical scenes. We are not told exactly what the records show, but the curator mentions their reaction: “It is important to say that I cried, I cried, when I saw it. What a reduction of life.” Despite being third in line, and temperamentally unsuitable for rule, this king appears to have reluctantly assumed the throne after the death of his two brothers, and then refused to rule. At this point, the novel slips into the world of the king, his queen, his hated chief advisor, the loyal young man, and the wider world of the court, swallowing up the curator and us the readers like an inverted jewel box, keeping us there, dazzled by the richness of its detail and, like the king, utterly unable to find our way out.

Perry’s poetry has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. I’ve also published an essay in book form about trampoline – growing up, I competed nationally and internationally – and it’s no exaggeration to suggest that the views we’re given in this book are often strangely brief and oblique, and never entirely stable. Let’s Feed the King consists of glimpses of scenes from strange angles and viewpoints, with reflections, shadows, and puzzling movements: rooms seen through windows or doorways, and half-heard conversations. It is as if we, not the long-dead courtiers, are the ghosts, creeping around the palace and peering into its rooms dressed in meticulous static, trying to interpret complex and momentous events from the few clues left behind.

The king is granted absolute power—he can start wars, launch fleets, and kill his subjects with a single word—yet exercising it requires complete personal surrender: “The king sees an apple that he wishes to pick, and someone is called upon to free it from the branch.” His growing misery is that of someone who has grown up as an object upon whom he is forced, and we sympathize with his quiet and then not-so-quiet rebellion as he seeks to escape his plight. More broadly, the novel asks us to acknowledge that we know almost nothing about history, or even about the lives of the people we live with contemporaneously. To read We May Feed the King is to enjoy rich pleasure but to be forced to sit with frustration: we want evidence, we want certainty, we want a logical story about the king, and Perry withholds it, instead making us watch our minds wander, compulsively piecing together the scattered pieces of the past.

At the end of the book, we return to the present day and to the world of the curators as they decorate scenes and invite the public to view their work. “His great gift to us—or at least it was a gift to me,” they say to the assembled crowd, as they speak of the king, “is the want of closure, which can drive a historian mad. What a great—pardon my language—‘damn you’ to anyone who tries to manipulate mystery to bring order, to disrupt the air.” Then they release the crowds into the rooms with a final instruction that made me wonder if my two close readings of the book had been enough, if in fact there might be a clue I had missed: “Listen to everything and, above all, pay attention.”