Why We're Obsessed with Royals: A Deep Dive into the Novel

This unusual three-part novel begins and ends with the unnamed curator conjuring our doomed king’s reign for the palace’s 750th anniversary celebrations. The art of dressing these scenes is to make it appear “as if the person or people have just left the room”. The line takes on increased significance in the later section when we discover the dramatic moment she chooses to depict. In between the novel rewinds many centuries — probably to the late Middle Ages, although it’s never specified — to follow the court machinations. We learn how the new king ascended to the throne unexpectedly after the deaths of his two elder brothers. Feeling like he has “just woken from a nightmare”, he refuses to partake of any of the usual kingly pursuits: blood sports, roughing up peasants, starting wars. His advisers are filled with contempt for their new leader, believing his rejection of power and violence to be a challenge to God, who chose him to rule. And since the queen is sleeping with a court physician, he is also seen as a cuckold. However, when his cousin’s glamorous wife visits from overseas, rumours fly that she has bewitched the king and possibly his wife too. Courtiers start to fret about the dangerous influence of two quietly confident queens. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List May We Feed the King contains a lot of sumptuous writing about sex and desire, and the sentences can be spellbinding and stirring. But the sensibilities of the characters feel modern and the novel reads more like a dream or a fairytale than a depiction of a particular period. This is mishmash medievalism rendered in short sentences and snappy chapters with striking titles (Pussy, for example). Perry is a TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet and her novel — much like the work of her friend AK Blakemore, author of The Glutton (2023) — prioritises poetic imagery, sensations and atmosphere over narrative, portraiture or historical inquiry. The vibes are strong, but it never quite approaches the domain of the real. • The Glutton by AK Blakemore — the man who couldn’t stop eating Then again, perhaps that’s entirely appropriate. What Perry is interested in is interrogating our ideas of monarchy. A maid-of-honour sometimes imagines having a threesome with the king and queen, and sometimes imagines killing them, depending on her mood. Kings and queens really do inhabit two realms, one real, one symbolic, as projections of our fantasies, sometimes sexual, sometimes murderous. Considering our nation’s relationship with the royals, it’s hard to evade the sense that nothing much has changed there.