It’s early evening in London as Rebecca Perry joins a Zoom call from her home to discuss “May We Feed the King,” her Booker Prize-shortlisted novel published in the U.S. by Berkeley’s Transit Books.
When asked about a small painting glimpsed behind her, Perry graciously shifts her computer screen to show her American visitor her art collection. “That’s my oil painting wall,” says Perry, showing off a collection of seven or eight coastal landscapes and botanical images. “And then a black cat with tulips, which is my favorite, because I have a black cat and I love tulips.”
As if on cue, the feline flatmate sounds off. “My black cat just emerged from the shadows and screamed, as if she knew that I was talking about her.”
This discussion of her art collection isn’t a digression. Perry’s debut novel has two narratives: the first is narrated by a modern-day curator who stages scenes for museums and historical sites, and the second concerns a reluctant king who once lived in the palace.
The novel’s well-deserved acclaim surprised Perry, a published poet who works for a charity promoting literacy in prisons.
“I was just writing something with no guarantee that it would ever see the light of day,” she says, adding that even after its U.K. publication earlier this year, the response was low-key before being longlisted for the Booker Prize. “I was really pleased with how it was doing. It was selling a normal fine amount for literary fiction and had nice reviews … And then the gear change happened basically within the space of a week.”
Still, the book nearly didn’t find a U.S. publisher, but Perry credits an editor at Daunt Books for tipping off Transit.
“No one had wanted it. And then, just by chance, Marigold Atkey, who’s the editor at Daunt Books, knows the Transit team and said, ‘You should read this book. No one’s publishing it in America,’” says Perry. “This was all pre-prize stuff, I should say. They went for it before any of this [critical recognition]. They took a punt on it when everyone else was like, ‘Nope, no, we don’t think so; thank you.’ I rate them for that hugely.”
Ashley Nelson Levy, Transit Books publisher and editor of the U.S. edition of Perry’s novel, was immediately taken with the novel.
“I read Rebecca’s book over the course of a weekend and immediately knew it was special. There’s a line toward the end of the novel about how history — recordkeeping, art, storytelling — makes us confront, one day, what we have lost. What I loved so much about this book were the pathways that Perry creates toward some semblance of an answer or merely its possibilities,” says Levy via email.
“It’s incredible to see the response the book has gotten here in the U.S. and abroad — readers are finding themselves swept up in the world she has built, which feels both recognizable in the depths of its grief and also like something never experienced before in fiction.”
The Booker Prize will be announced on Nov. 9 at a livestreamed event in London. Perry has attended in years past as part of her literacy work, but she admits she’ll be a bit more nervous this time. Still, that’s OK.
“I feel like I’m in a really lucky position because the Booker is so huge,” she says, sounding sincerely pleased just to be nominated with authors including Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout and Douglas Stuart. “Being on a shortlist, it just feels massive, almost to the point where I’m like, ‘That actually is probably enough for now. I’m good with this.’”
In a conversation edited for length and clarity, Perry discussed the book, her longstanding interests and the quiet places she found to write the novel.
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Q: How do you describe the novel for people who haven’t read it?
A: Fortunately, it’s relatively plotless [laughs], so we don’t have to worry about ruining anything in a major way. I describe it really badly. We start the book with a contemporary curator who works in historic buildings and is recovering from some undisclosed kind of trauma. As part of a new commission, they discover a king in the archives of the palace they’re working in. Their interest in that king grows, and then at that point we enter the story of the king, who is incredibly reluctant, unprepared and unwilling to take power and do any of the stuff he’s expected to do.
So we follow his story, and then at the end we emerge again into the present day. Sometimes I talk about storytelling and history and reliability, other times more about power and refusal of absolute power — or the power of the imagination and desire. I think that’s why I’m bad at describing it, because you can frame it in loads of different ways.
Q: To be fair, it’s not your job to explain the book. You wrote it.
A: Yeah, but you do need to accept that you must tell people briefly what it’s about. [laughs]
Q: In the novel, someone says the narrator really loves this work. You can take that comment at face value, but it also suggests this person is very intense. How did you find this voice for the book?
A: It was quite a sort of meandering journey. I was working on two short stories separately, and one was about a woman obsessed with replica food who was embarking on a project to set up lots of scenes in her house. She was the protagonist, and then I realized that she would be conjuring the spirit of the young attendant who was the subject of the second story I was working on separately. So I was like, ‘Oh no, it’s not two separate short stories. It’s one book.
I really loved the idea that something so outrageous and ridiculous was being taken so incredibly seriously, and then you start to take it really seriously as well. You understand that it’s serving this person in ways that you wouldn’t have necessarily imagined or been able to see from the beginning. I loved the absolute seriousness juxtaposed with the absurdity of the work.
Q: You have two separate narratives, one about the curator and the other about the king. Readers have speculated that the curator imagines the king’s story. Did you have that clear in your mind?
A: I wanted it to be equally possible that it was completely her imagining and also as possible that it was the quote-unquote real story – or also the scraps of the archive created into a narrative. So yeah, I don’t know which one it is, and that’s fine by me. I don’t know any of the answers to those questions. I’ve left it so that everything is feasible.
Q: Let me ask about the curator’s obsession with replica food. Did you do a lot of research for that?
A: The website I reference in the book is real, and I spent a lot of time looking at the different things that were available to purchase. But I also went to lots of places where scenes had been staged, and I said to my friends, I want to write about this in some way: replica, and the conjuring that happens when rooms are staged like this.
And then I started looking back through my phone, and I had like hundreds of photos over the years of different scenes I’ve taken pictures of in different buildings. So I’d clearly just been doing it for a really long time, but I hadn’t realized quite the extent of my interest in it. I was like, “Oh wow, I’ve really been taking pictures of this stuff for a really long time.”
I went to historic buildings and stood in rooms and tried to figure out what was working if the scene was working and what was killing it if it wasn’t, or what was missing. You can also look at the quality of the replicas as well; if you’ve got all of this amazing quality replica food, and there’s just a couple of bits that ruin it, I thought that’d be so annoying to somebody who really cares about this as an art form.
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Q: You published first as a poet, and I was looking back through your poems, such as “Beaches (1).” In it, the narrator is looking at a painting and reacting to it. It felt connected to your novel, even though it was published 10 years ago. Do you feel a connection?
A: I haven’t written poetry for a long time, so it does feel quite far away. But I also know that I’ve got poems about the execution of Lady Jane Grey. I’ve always been drawn to animating history in some way, which I think is definitely true of this book as well. But also looking at the stories that we know really well, or think we do, and looking at a different angle to it, like in the poem where we’re looking at a painting of the execution of Lady Jane Grey, a lot ends up being from the perspective of one of the ladies-in-waiting in the corner facing away.
Eggs come up loads, and eggs ended up being very important to “May We Feed the King” as well. I emailed my editor, and I was like, Can you withdraw the last final draft I sent you because I have to write a couple of egg themes? This is really important.” I think it’s definitely true that there are these things that are always just buzzing away in your head, and then they go away, and come back in different ways.
That’s a very long way of saying, yeah, that’s absolutely true.
Q: This is such a readable book; its short chapters propel you along. I was going through it again, and thought, I’m going to return to this book.
A: There’s this idea that books, if they’re going to be weighty and meaningful, have to be difficult or challenging, or you have to trudge through them. But if I think about the writing I really love, it will be people like Gwendoline Riley, who was on the Longlist, and Mary Ruefle — people presenting things in a really deceptively straightforward way, but they’re not at all. And I love that, and I really believe things should be readable and enjoyable.
Q: You’re a gardener and have an Instagram for your garden, and I think that your awareness of plants and nature enriches your writing. Do you think it has an effect on your writing?
A: You’ve done so much research; this is great. I love the physical act of being in the garden. I love switching your brain off completely, which I think I really do, and I don’t know if I do that anywhere else particularly. You can create beautiful things, and you can create things that are good for the planet, which makes me feel sometimes, when you’re having an existential climate catastrophe day, as if the bees in your garden are going to help. It’s really reassuring. These tiny things can feel meaningful and good against a backdrop of general horror; it’s important to remember that those things are possible and not become completely disheartened.
I find it helpful in terms of patience. I’m not super patient, generally speaking, either with writing or in just life. I think things like dormancy in the garden and planting bulbs in October, November, and having to wait and believe that they will come out in April maybe, if you’re lucky. Or maybe they won’t. That kind of stuff I find really helpful because you know your brain is doing lots of work all the time, and sometimes you have to just sit and let things have time to percolate and figure out their order and stuff like that.
So yeah, the garden is really helpful for me in that sense; I write out there. If I’m not writing in the bath, I write in the garden pretty much; that’s kind of my two worlds. When I got my advance for this book from [U.K. publisher] Granta, I bought a new dining table and chair set for the garden. That was my treat to myself.
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