“Not feeding the King is worse than starving the people,” writes Rebecca Perry midway through her elegant, elliptical debut novel.
A macabre fable about appetite in all its guises, at the book’s epicentre is a fictional royal who does not share his court’s taste for violence, so is outcast. Perry’s novel unfurls like one of the palace garden roses the king is so obsessed by, its outermost layer – and framing narrative – an unnamed curator tasked with composing six intricate, historically accurate scenes for visitors in the king’s former abode turned public museum.
How reliable this narrator is in relaying the king’s story is left murky. Before the events of the novel, some unspecified disaster has struck: “a great lesson in perspective”. Perry begins by inducting us into their process as they trawl through online catalogues of glistening fake food to create a semblance of life (“it must appear as if the person or people have just left the room”), while establishing their exacting, droll, often rueful voice.
The king’s story – third in line to the throne, the “dreaded alternative” who has been “allowed to become odd” – is sandwiched between the curator’s perspective. Since the monarch lacks the usual stomach for brutality, his ravenous subjects, “baby birds, mouths open and trembling for news of their new ruler”, grow restless and a maelstrom of salacious and absurd rumours swirl around him and his queen. Though the curator and king’s narrative strands are kept discrete, it’s clear they bleed into one another: at one point, the king drops an egg and it miraculously rolls, as if made from rubber.
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A poet shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, Perry suffuses her prose with the kind of lyricism you’d expect from her (“a fresh day, like cutting into an apple”; bodies “like slugs on young plants after rain”), revelling in the cloying materiality of this historical feast for the senses. But Perry’s project is also to question the fickle nature of storytelling itself, keeping her characters at arm’s length in a way that is deliberately unsatiating. Even if Perry’s work sometimes opts for style over substance, this is a taut and assured first novel which surely marks the beginning of an eminent novel-writing career.
Miriam Balanescu is a critic for The Irish Times, Financial Times, Prospect and The Observer
