It’s been a long time since I’ve gone straight to a shop and brought a brand-new book straight off a recommendation. I had a birthday voucher burning a whole in my wallet but I’d also had this excited news from my husband: the Waterstones debut fiction prize is all about a curator! Something about the title really called to me: ‘May we feed the king’; and I loved the cover illustration of a historic French collection of wax pear specimens.
I really wanted to like this novel. And in many ways, I did. This may be Rebecca Perry’s debut novel, but she is already a prize-winning poet and this shows in the writing. It is compelling and lyrical, weaving magic out of short segments of story in which we never know the character’s names. The short chapters have tantalising titles like ‘Enquiries, merely’ or ‘The question of preservation’.
The narrative revolves around two main characters. First: the present-day curator who is employed to do the set dressing of a medieval palace in order to tell the stories of its past inhabitants to the visiting public. Two: the reclusive medieval king whose story she unearths and seeks to make visible, becoming obsessed with his short and seemingly ignominious reign. The story moves between their lives as the curator’s work brings to life the medieval king, and we the reader begin to sense the unrevealed sadness that sits behind her own life: the mix of power and impotence that seems to surround both lives.
Both the characters and their scene settings are compelling, and both entice you with a rich sense of the magic of uncovering and telling historic stories. The curator builds a relationship with the palace’s archivist, and you sense the shared thrill as they trace the king’s story through the records. The king is a reluctant monarch, inheriting on the death of two older brothers, and you follow his sadness and inertia as he struggles to take on their mantle. Perry’s prose is both precise and luscious, leaving you with a tantalising sense of the scents and tastes of the worlds that her characters inhabit, with a food a crucial part of both stories.
I say that I was torn because I loved all of this. The story brings you a layered, rich sense of the medieval past, and of nuanced characters living their lives within the pomp of a royal court. More importantly for me, it also gives you the thrill of the historical chase, of the curator’s excitement as she finds her character and follows him through the archive. Importantly, it also gives you a sense of the gaps in the archive, and the creative ways that stories can be seen in the silences as much as the words recorded.
But I just couldn’t get away from the fact that this character is fundamentally not a curator. This may seem pedantic, but amongst what feels nuanced and authentic about much of the novel, and the research that Perry has clearly put behind it, this feels deeply jarring. The curator’s ultimate output is to set dress the palace with wax food (thus the pears on the cover). This is not something that curators do, or barely ever.
What curators do is care to for collections and historic spaces, either through permanent collections or bringing them together through exhibitions, or both. They make collections visible and accessible through myriad different ways. This may well include the layout and dressing of a room, it usually involves the choosing and arrangement of objects, and certainly involves research: looking for unknown stories, and thinking about how to give these magic for others.
The history of food, cooking and eating is fascinating and important but reducing the idea of a curator to the arranging of wax food not only belittles this complex role, but also obscures the equally significant roles who would actually be more involved in this part of bringing a historic space to life: the interpretation experts, the designers, the conservators, and the technicians.
I’ve relatively recently come around to the idea that the proliferation of the idea of ‘curating’ is more a compliment than an insult to the profession, implying care, expertise and skill. I don’t expect everyone to know the complex nature of the role, but I was ultimately saddened that a novel that demonstrates such mastery of and understanding for research hasn’t extended this care to the rich reality of being a curator.