May We Feed The King - Rebecca Perry
I haven't posted here in a while because I've been very burned out recently, but I've been reading a lot and recently started reading this year's Booker Prize Longlist. I've been reviewing those books over on Tiktok and decided this evening that it's time to port those reviews over to this blog, since that's what the blog is for.
One of my favourite things about trying to read the Booker longlist every year is how many great debuts end up on it, and how often those debuts end up being my favourites of the whole list. I'm thinking about books like Rita Bullwinkle's Headshot, or Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep - two books I absolutely adored. May We Feed The King has immediately joined that list.
I'd heard of it before, because it won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, but I hadn't got round to actually picking it up. I think what put me off was that it's historical fiction, and historical fiction and I don't tend to get on. But that doesn't matter here. If that's the thing putting you off, ignore it, because this is so good. It's historical fiction that's actually about the fiction of history.
The book follows a person - I think a woman, though I'm going to just say a person - whose job is staging scenes in palaces and stately homes. She builds the dioramas you walk through when you visit these places, the immersive little tableaux that are supposed to make history feel lived-in and alive, the ones that are meant to surprise you. We follow her as she's brought in to put together the scenes for a palace's anniversary - the seven hundred and fiftieth, or something like that. The specific number doesn't matter. The palace needs money and needs visitors, so they're having an anniversary, and they need someone to stage history for them.
She arrives, starts digging through the archives, and tries to work out what narrative to hang on the place. Eventually she settles on the story of a specific king who lived there. From here the book cuts back to history - however long ago that is - and we learn about this king, and the people around him, before eventually returning to the present to see how she actually builds the scenes.
It's a quiet, tender, delicate book, and it's ultimately about people. It's a book that keeps reminding you that history is people, and that the big, solid-seeming facts we think we know are built on top of an invisible substrate of small, intimate details we can never actually access. It's a book that keeps pointing at history and saying: we can't really know anything for certain once everyone who was there is dead and gone. We can't know what happened, not really. We definitely can't know what was in anyone's head, what they were thinking, what was driving them. All we can do is look at whatever sources survive and build a fiction on top of them.
I think this book is in conversation with more than just history as a subject - it's in conversation with the whole genre of historical fiction, and with the idea of historical accuracy itself. It doesn't even attempt to be accurate. We're never told what period we're in, what king we're dealing with (I don't think he's even real), or really what country we're in, though I'd guess the UK. And none of that matters, because the book's whole argument is that all history is fiction, and the stories we tell about ourselves are all fiction too, in the end.
It's a genuinely excellent debut. I was off work sick, not feeling great, and I sat on the sofa and read the whole thing in a couple of hours, and loved every minute of it.