May We Feed the King

I finished this book on a Tuesday night, sitting at my kitchen table with water I kept forgetting to drink, while the narrator stepped over a bisected pig in her dining room. That is a strange sentence, but it worked on me. The pig is a replica. The apples are resin. The woman has spent the whole novel making rooms feel like someone just left them, and in the last pages she is doing it at home, with the one person who ever understood why.

I should say plainly that this review gets into the ending, because the ending is not a twist and not a reveal. The King disappears. The book will not tell you what happened to him. If you need a mystery solved, this novel will fight you, and it does not care.

Late in the book, the curator gives a talk at the palace, called 'The Question of Preservation.' She asks how we know anything about history, not the wars but the texture of a life. She mentions Garnier Valletti, who made resin replicas of 286 apples that no longer exist. What the replicas cannot tell us is what the apples tasted like. Preserved and completely gone. A resin apple is the ghost of a thing you never got to eat. That is the whole book in one paragraph.

Before that, May We Feed the King has two layers. In the present, an unnamed curator who builds historical food scenes takes a commission at a former palace. In the past, a young Attendant watches one King die and then serves the dead King's brother, who never wanted the throne and is bad at faking it. If you need a tightly wound plot, those two descriptions are your warning. This is a book that will pause for several pages to think about the way a ham slice curls. I mean that as a compliment and a warning.

I loved the curator's work sections. There is a chapter about the website where she buys replica food, and it is the most specific thing I have read in months. A pork joint wrapped in muslin costs £45. A single slice of parma ham costs £14. A half oyster shell is £31.25, while a whole leg of venison is only £55. She knows the gherkins are filed under celebration food, not vegetables. I know the milk count at work the way she knows that website. That kind of expertise sounds insane from outside and logical from inside, and the book honors it.

Her guiding rule is that a scene must look like the person has just left the room, the air still alive with them. I do the same thing with the espresso bar before I hand it over, although I never say it so poetically. She tests a scene with real herbs: if the real thing gives the fake thing away, she starts over. That is a work ethic I respect even when I found the book slow.

There is a section called 'My Great Lesson in Perspective' where she steals three ugly plastic fish from a mediocre display at a historic house. The fish are bad enough to ruin the whole room. She is going through something in her life that she cannot fix, so she fixes the fish instead and walks out with them in her bag. I have never stolen a museum fish, but I understand the impulse. When you cannot make the large thing better, you still need one small wrong thing corrected. That chapter told me exactly who this narrator was.

The book is also about appetite failing. The curator stops being able to eat because she is surrounded by fake food, and she begins to expect real eggs to bounce. She cannot buy a chicken because the real one is too much itself. Her grief occupies the house like furniture. The book never explains exactly what she lost. It gives us an empty chair and 'the quietest part of my day' and lets us fill in the rest. I respected that, even though I usually hate filling things in.

The medieval sections are anchored by the young Attendant, who is having the worst shift of his life and cannot clock out. He watches the King's breathing change like a puppet's. He tries to lie with his wife and sees the dying King instead. A lady-in-waiting comes every day to ask the same question, 'May we feed the King?', and both know it is a charade. There is something recognizable about performing a question you are required to ask and an answer you are required to give. I have been that person behind a register. It is exhausting in a way that has no language.

The new King is the brother who was never supposed to rule. He is not hungry for power. He wants to garden, to touch things, to stand in a field without anyone watching. He sweeps ash from his own fireplace and wipes the crust from his cat's eyes. He sees a flower he wants to pick for the Queen, and by the time it reaches her it has been chosen, washed, polished, and presented in a tiny vase. It is pink and anonymous. That is the whole tragedy in one image.

The court sections lost me in the middle. The book keeps using a device where someone is 'looking in through a crack in the door,' and after the fourth or fifth time I started to feel the stage directions underneath. The rumors about the cousin's wife and the King multiply until I could not always tell what had actually happened and what was gossip. I think that is deliberate and also a test of patience. There were stretches where I stopped caring which advisor wanted which outcome and simply waited for the book to get back to the curator or the Attendant.

The Queen and the cousin's wife are the most interesting people in the court, partly because the book refuses to explain them. She arrives alone, criticizes the food, and gets the King to laugh. She is called a harlot and a schemer, and maybe she is, or maybe she is the only direct person in the palace. The Queen has a lover she loves and a husband she is trying to protect. I think the book thinks the question is the answer.

The King and Queen vanish. The court invents a dozen theories, some comfortable and some terrible, and the reader never learns which one is true. The old Attendant, dying, tells his daughter he saw the King again. 'He is gone, into another life.' That line did something to me. It made the lack of an answer feel like mercy. The King finally got to be somewhere else. The book just refuses to tell us where.

Meanwhile, the curator has found the archivist. Their connection is built out of white gloves and photocopies and a person who keeps appearing at your shoulder with a new page because they know you will like it. The archivist says records should never be final. I have never been in love with an archivist, but I understood the pull. It is the feeling of being seen by someone who also takes the work seriously.

The curator chooses the King because his ledger entry is a cruel reduction of a life: 'Traitor King' and 'Apple King,' a coward who threw apples at his captors and lost his head. The palace wants a display. She wants to give him back his texture. She will not tell the audience what really happened because she does not know, and she thinks the not knowing is more honest than a made-up ending. A record that gets the person wrong is a second death. A record that leaves room might be a kind of life.

I should be honest about the cost. This is a slow book. It repeats itself. It will spend two pages on a flower and then skip a death. If you need to know where the hand is on the clock, this will drive you up a wall. It is not really about power. It is about the people standing at the edges of power, holding the tray and watching.

It is also weird. A king cuts open his servants to look for a lost ring. A teller can never find the barn where two corpses lie. A maid-of-honour has a violent fantasy. None of it is gratuitous, exactly, but it is strange. This is a book about food that will sometimes make you lose your appetite, which is a specific achievement.

I would not recommend it to the person who needs a page-turner. I would recommend it to the person who likes watching a competent worker think. If you have ever organized a shelf before studying because you could not think until the shelf was quiet, or if you have ever felt that a copy of something was both a comfort and a lie, this book is aimed at you. It is a book for people who save receipts and notice when the light is wrong.

There were times I almost put it down. Somewhere in the middle of the court rumors, I lost the thread and considered walking away. I am glad I did not. The ending does not reward you with answers. It rewards you with confidence that arranging things, food or scenes or words, is a legitimate way to hold a loss. I have not stopped thinking about the apple replicas. That is a good sign and also a warning about what kind of person I am.

For a certain reader, this is a book they will love and not be able to explain to anyone. I can explain it; it just sounds strange out loud. It is about the moment after a person leaves the room. The air still moving. The indent still in the chair. The bite still in the pie. If that question is enough for you, read it. If not, this one will only disappoint you. I am glad I read it. I will still not hand it to most people I know.

On the replica food website the gherkins sit with the celebration food, not with the vegetables. A rustic loaf is listed under historical foods and is nowhere in the bread section. A pork joint wrapped in muslin is forty-five pounds. One slice of parma ham is fourteen. A half oyster shell, shining as if with brine, is thirty-one pounds twenty-five. A full cooked leg of venison is fifty-five. The narrator knows this catalogue like a map she barely needs. She trusts the strange prices. She says we should never presume to know the intricacies of another person's craft. I started there and I stayed there, because that is my kind of seriousness. I am going to talk about the ending. The King disappears from the palace with the Queen. The last rooms are dressed as if the household has only just walked out. If you want him to remain a living problem on the page, stop before the autumn frost. I will not dance around it.

The job arrives after months of small, not very compelling work. A former palace, now a historic house, wants six scenes for a 750-year anniversary. Nobody has checked whether the date marks the first foundation, the first inhabitants, or the first mention in local records. When a site needs cash, a round number will do. Special events. Footfall. Maybe a film scout. Feed the horse a sugar lump and hope it shits gold. That line is crude and accurate. The brief is clear. King's chambers, kitchens, Queen's parlour, an attendant's quarters, medical practices of the time, a feast in the great hall. Fee and materials budget are decent. There are archives on site, which is rare. She has spent twenty-two years putting pomegranates beside pies for a reason, and leaving an ink pot empty on purpose. One in a thousand people will sense the purple ink they cannot see. I liked that she holds those people in mind without pretending the rest of the public does not exist.

Her rule, the one that contains the others about colour and balance, is this. It must appear as if the person has just left the room. The air still alive. They will be back at any moment. If not, you have an arrangement of objects. The scene is dead. I know this from a different floor. Right labels, wrong location, and the computer will still lie to you. She cannot control what happens after handover. Cleaners jostle. Visitors unclip the rope. A jester juggles replica pomegranates that bounce hollow on parquet. A costumed king waves a chicken leg, then sets it down upside down, logo showing. She is very clear that deep cleaning of the scenes is hers alone, with special cloths, and the message never reaches the people who need it. I believed her irritation more than I believe most novels about art. The work is finished when she says it is finished. Other people treat that as a suggestion.

She takes a blank tour first. Cellar and buttery, then kitchens, pantry, larder, storerooms. She does not let the rooms speak yet. Later she walks alone and notes where the air gets dense, the bloody corners, stone so cold it seems wet. The palace is teeming. The next morning the archivist waits in the dim. White gloves. Everything, they say, when she asks what there is. Ledgers, recipes, feasts, coffers, remedies, letters, prayers, instructions for pests and roofs. She feels light with anticipation for the first time in two or three years. Then it is too much. She refuses the café and goes to order her thoughts. That night real food becomes a threat. Chicken juice on the hand. A split banana skin. Ribs at a baby's feet in a pram. She freezes the bird and hides pasta under parmesan. Those few seconds after the extractor fan and the kitchen light, walking past the table where they used to sit, are the quietest of her day. She turns the television on immediately.

She finds her King on the fifth day, in a scant messy page, as if she had manifested it. She cried. What a reduction of a life. She refuses to relay the ledger in full. She does not want Great Rulers and tables of every meat. She wants a small silver fish head on a plate for a cat. The Apple King is there as a possible subject. She rejects him as only a coward. The archivist knows the man she has chosen. Of course. Photocopies travel home on the passenger seat, King's entry on top. She can sit at the dining table again. The opposite chair is vacant, not a void. In a quiet bar a member of staff says it is beautiful that someone is so in love with their work. She realises nobody has used that word for it. Important, serious, yes. Love, no. The archivist tells her they can always eat penne pomodoro even when queasy. She feels something like appetite. I trusted this more than a speech about recovery. Appetite returning is a quantity you can notice.

Then Rebecca Perry does the thing that makes the book larger. She puts you inside the court she has been building. The young Attendant, maybe a year or two younger than his dying King, eats between shifts. Pie like a stone. Chicken skin jiggling from his mouth. The Queen arrived green from a boat, shocked by winter, confessed the darkness sat on her bed, and of course a Queen has no secrets. She is dead two years. He cannot lie with his wife without tasting the sickroom. Every day the same lady-in-waiting knocks twice on the door and asks, with new words, whether they may feed him. Salted mutton. Bone broth. Fruit jelly. The answers are theatre. A light supper. Stewed fruits cut small. Very well, she says, and takes the order down. Plates come back untouched except by tasters and hungry holy men. Kitchen staff eat. This is operations under a closed door. You still have to cook. You still have to ask. The title is not a metaphor. It is the daily question.

Death arrives without a distinct moment. A holy man leans to the mouth. The physician hovers a hand. Arms folded on the chest. The lady at the door feels the air change, like walking from a field into forest. The Attendant says no thank you and goes to cry where his wife cannot see him. The faces of the other men do not flicker. King alive, King dead, same faces. The third brother becomes King. He wants someone to admit the whole thing is absurd. Documents wait for a dead signature. An inkpot wants filling. He remembers the eldest as a violent boy, the second as a meadow who soaked everything up, himself as the indent on a chair. He signs away lives with too little information. A father and son, old treason, gaol space needed. Ink drips where the name should go. You may sign anywhere, my Lord. At the block the axe takes two blows on the son. Advisors later pulp a chicken leg with a cleaver, laughing about urine. The King looks for someone in the shadows to save him. I did not need the book to lecture me about power. I needed the wet details. Perry supplies them.

He will not hunt to kill. He will not send troops to a village over taxes. The Chief Advisor spits on his sleeve. Would you have us be an anvil. The King feeds ham to the cat. He asks the young Attendant to sit and says visiting the deathbed made him sick. What does that say about a man. The Queen still goes to her physician's assistant. The King envies dirt under someone else's nails. He cannot snip geraniums himself. They arrive in a tiny vase, anonymous. Council wants to verify that the Queen bleeds, that sheets are used, that encouraging sounds are heard at the door. The Attendant is told to pick a girl who looks eager to please or quick to cry. He names the lady who used to ask after the dying King's appetite. She loves the Queen and is faithful. She laughs at their threats. They call the boy useless. In future, open your ears.

His mistake is a simple question to a new advisor who smells of rosemary. Assemble the ledgers. Did a king once leave the throne and live. The man's eyes narrow toward the door. The Apple King is in the book. He rode west on solstice, threw windfall apples, was dragged back, beheaded, his head displayed and pelted until flesh loosened. Visiting envoys later brought baskets of apples as a joke. May we forget him. The cousin's wife arrives unaccompanied, refuses help from the carriage, looks at the King directly, complains of nothing, drinks, asks questions. She sits in emergency council over a rumbling island and asks why they should not lose the land. The army is despatched at night without the King's command. Mercy, he asks later. They are not people like us, says the Chief Advisor. Gossip invents the Attendant in the King's mouth, three lovers, a shoe under huge skirts. The young Attendant, on night watch, hears the King rehearse a speech. Are we not isolated and inward-looking. Are we not stifled. He lets the words enter and leave. He knows the King would not want a witness. That is loyalty as I understand it. You do not forward the message.

I will say again that the King is gone. Autumn, first frost. Council piles into the chamber. Ready the horses. Gardens, tracks, missing cloaks, cold beds. The young Attendant stops on the path to look at one frosted leaf, silver as a fish. For two days riders leave and return. Stories bloom like a short shipment with five explanations. Poison, woods, fire. A ship, a cousin, paperwork for abdication. The Queen howling, taken for a wolf. The physician missing his assistant. The Chief Advisor repeating that the situation is without precedent, keep your heads. The horse found with sheep. A woman seen running from the maze. Troops in the trees that might be flies. Kitchen staff eat almonds and pie and laugh. Nobility cannot sit. Years later the Attendant is old and dying. He tells his daughter he knows the King. He saw him. He is gone into another life. The country prefers not to speak of that reign. Children tell a story of two corpses in a barn, jewels on bone, a rat asleep in the skull. I do not need one of these to be true. I need them all to be possible. That is what an unsigned absence looks like.

The last part returns to the curator and a talk on the question of preservation. How do we know history. A girl says textbooks. Letters. Songs. Art that may be propaganda. The archivist, in the front row, says of the lost apple varieties of Italy: to make us confront, one day, what we have lost. She projects the King's humiliating page and tells the audience there are no answers. His gift is the lack of an ending. She asked the archivist to make opposing choices in the rooms so she could not write a final story. The kitchens show preparation abandoned, a pig reaching for its own head. The parlour has a needle hanging from blue thread. The attendant's desk has the King's seal on a letter you cannot read. The King's grate holds a warrant to execute, name burned, signature blank. An apple by the curtain. A purple cloak in a wardrobe crack. The palace staff complain the research took too long and who would see the needle. She takes the replica food home for a fee reduction. Boxes in light rain. She steps over the bisected pig. She puts a bay leaf in the prayer book where a birch leaf had been. She leaves the last apple for the archivist.

I recommend it. Quantity, timing, a signature: those are the three things I ask of any record. This book keeps answering them even when the answers are missing. Replica eggs have overtaken real eggs in her hands. She expects them to bounce. She still does not pierce a poached egg on a friend's plate, and she knows that if she does, she has lost her grip. The King who cannot eat, cannot pick fruit, cannot refuse the job except by vanishing, is not a puzzle for a clever reader. He is a man dropped into a role that requires a stomach for blood he does not have. Staff still plate the food. Advisors still need a signature. Rumour still loads the empty dock. Perry writes the court like a place with shifts, leftovers, and an unofficial channel, except the unofficial channel here is a crack in a door. I finished the book. I thought about the lady-in-waiting's ulcer and the Attendant's chicken skin and the unsigned warrant in the ash. I thought about the empty chair becoming a chair again because papers were spread on the table. That is enough. If you want to know what was left on the plate when the people walked out, read this.

I expected to have considerable patience with a novel about someone whose profession depends on getting small details right. That is usually a reliable way of getting my attention. The unnamed curator in May We Feed the King researches historic interiors and constructs scenes from replica food and other objects, down to the position of a pie or the particular angle from which a visitor will see it. Unfortunately, the patience did not last. I stopped in Part II at “ANTS”, during the council’s interrogation of the young Attendant and the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, roughly halfway through this edition. By then the novel had repeatedly made its central points about power, performance, grief and observation, but kept arranging another scene to make them again. I cannot say whether the later sections alter that pattern, and I did not read them to find out.

The trouble was not the amount of detail in itself. Early on, the detail is precisely what works. The curator knows a replica-food website so thoroughly that she can distinguish its convincing chicken leg from its inadequate potatoes and its laughable beef tomato. There are nine varieties of replica egg. She knows why real herbs can expose the artificiality of everything around them and why a scene has failed if the illusion does not survive the addition of scent. This is peculiar knowledge, but it has a purpose. Her governing rule is that a room must look as though its occupants have only just left it. Otherwise it is merely an arrangement of objects. I understood that immediately, and it gave the opening proper authority.

I also liked that her professionalism is not presented as uncomplicated virtue. She once stole three dreadful plastic fish from somebody else’s historic display because she could not tolerate them remaining there. She dislikes visitors stepping beyond ropes because her scenes have been constructed for a particular viewing position. A costumed King once picked up one of her replica chicken legs and replaced it upside down, exposing the manufacturer’s mark. She is exacting to the point of being absurd, and the book knows it. She can also be extremely good at what she does. That combination felt recognisable to me: expertise can improve a job while making the expert rather trying company.

The palace commission initially strengthens all this. She is hired to build six scenes for a questionable 750th anniversary and discovers unusually rich archives on site. The management want visible progress; she keeps researching. That tension is sound because both parties have a case. The palace has a deadline and has commissioned installations, not indefinite study. The curator understands that assembling objects before she understands the people would produce exactly the lifeless display she despises. I was less convinced by the extent to which the book sides with her absorption. When office staff ask when she might actually start assembling the scenes, she lies that this is her normal process. I found myself thinking their question was entirely reasonable.

There is a quieter story underneath about loss. Her appetite has gone wrong, her house is empty in a way that clearly means more than an unoccupied room, and friends ask how she is managing alone. A supermarket scene, where packaged meat beside a baby’s bare feet becomes almost intolerable to her, makes that disturbance physical without initially explaining all of it. The archivist at the palace then becomes both collaborator and object of attraction. Their conversations revive something in her. This material interested me more when Perry trusted an action or observation to carry it. The curator taking copied records home, spreading them over the dining table and finding that the empty chair opposite feels merely vacant rather than like a void says enough.

My first substantial loss of patience came from how often that kind of observation is followed by another image performing much the same duty. Rooms breathe, spaces speak, depth becomes a dark pool, knowledge is a pool to drink from, the curator swims through chambers, the house has held its breath. Almost every physical object is available for comparison with something else. Some are sharp, but the accumulated effect made me conscious of the writing when I wanted to be conscious of the object. There is an odd contradiction here. The curator insists upon exact placement and material specificity, while the prose frequently keeps converting the exact thing in front of us into another thing.

Part II then changes register and reconstructs the court of the curator’s chosen King. The opening is strong. A young attendant watches a dying monarch whose body has been bled, leeched and treated beyond usefulness. Every day a lady comes from the kitchens to ask whether the King might eat, although everyone knows he will not. Different wording, same question, same pretence. That repetition has a reason: an institution is carrying out its procedure because nobody can admit the procedure no longer corresponds to reality. The King eventually dies so quietly that those attending him have to check. The attendant goes back to his room and cries, troubled that the other men appeared barely to react. That sequence was the best part of Part II that I read.

His younger brother then becomes King, a role he neither expected nor wants. He is appalled by how casually advisers require him to authorise violence. Eventually they pressure him into approving the execution of a father and son held for years for treason. He attends, sees the first axe stroke fail to sever the son’s neck, and discovers exactly what his signature means on the ground. Again, that is effective because an abstraction becomes an observed consequence. It also establishes the conflict perfectly adequately: this King has formal power but little appetite for exercising it, while the machinery around him depends upon power being exercised.

Unfortunately, the novel keeps establishing it. The advisers demand action; the King recoils. They want war; he refuses. They dislike his passivity; he wants the garden, his cats, privacy and ordinary physical tasks. They press him about producing an heir. Rumour interprets his gentleness as weakness or sexual inadequacy. The Queen, who has a lover with the King's knowledge, understands him better than the court does. There are useful variations, but by “A BOX WITH A LID” I felt I had already been given sufficient evidence. The King is trapped by office, the council is threatened by his refusal to behave as a King should, and everyone around them converts uncertainty into gossip. I did not need each proposition demonstrated another three times.

The King himself has appealing particularities. He likes wiping the crust from his cats’ eyes. He envies the Queen’s physician because that man is permitted to be useful with his hands. He resents that if he wants to pick an apple or flower, somebody immediately does it for him. Those details make his objection to kingship more interesting than simple cowardice. He wants direct contact with things and people in a system designed to interpose servants, ritual and authority between him and everything else. There is also a neat correspondence with the curator, who wants visitors to encounter history directly while controlling their viewing position to an extraordinary degree. I was interested in that contradiction. I was simply no longer interested enough in the repeated demonstrations surrounding it.

“ANTS” finished me because the council scene contains the whole difficulty in concentrated form. While the King is away, advisers discuss his failure to produce an heir and speculate crudely about whether he and the Queen are actually having sex. They summon one of her ladies and question her about the Queen’s menstruation, bed sheets and conversations. When she gives them nothing, they turn on the young Attendant and demand information about noises from the royal bedroom. It is meant to show an institution becoming invasive and ridiculous when access to power feels uncertain. It does. The scene is uncomfortable, petty and revealing. It is also another lengthy confirmation that these men are controlling, frightened by the King’s noncompliance and incapable of leaving private life alone. When it ended, my reaction was not curiosity about what they would do next. It was that I already knew what sort of pressure the book would apply next, even if I did not know the event.

There is plainly deliberate repetition here, just as the dying King is offered food day after day and the new King wakes each morning to the same unwanted role. Deliberate does not automatically mean successful. Repetition can make pressure accumulate; it can also reduce the reader’s need to continue. That was what happened to me. By my stopping point, I understood the curator’s fixation, her grief, her growing attachment to the archivist, the unwanted King’s temperament, the Queen’s unusual marriage and the council’s resentment. What I lacked was a sufficiently strong reason to spend another evening watching those relationships restated through new rumours, meals, gardens and observations. I cannot judge where Perry eventually takes them, how the palace installations turn out, or whether the book later changes its method. I can judge the substantial portion I read. It contained enough exact, memorable material to keep me going much longer than my irritation suggested it would, but eventually the book's own insistence on looking again defeated my wish to look once more.

I sat down with this on a Thursday evening at the folding desk in the bedroom, after a late train in from Piccadilly. I had meant to give it an hour before bed. I gave it most of that night, then another stretch on Saturday morning at the kitchen table, with a mug of tea that went cold twice while I kept thinking the next titled fragment would finally start the job. I did not finish it. I stopped in Part II, in the section called LOOP. I will not talk about anything after that because I did not read it. I did get past the first king dying, so if you wanted that left alone, you can stop here.

The opening looks, briefly, like a book about work. A woman who has spent twenty-two years dressing historic rooms gets a commission for a former palace marking a 750-year anniversary that nobody has actually pinned to a real date. Head office want six scenes: chambers, kitchens, parlour, attendant’s quarters, medical kit, a feast in the great hall. They also want her for a Meet the Experts weekend. The fee is decent, the archives are on site, and she has a rule I understood at once: a scene is dead unless it looks as if the people have only just left. I do a different sort of paperwork, but I know the feeling of trying to make a room tell the truth without anyone standing in it explaining. For maybe thirty pages I was willing. The brief was clear. Someone, at last, appeared to own the next step.

Then she opens the replica-food website and the book decides that browsing is character. We get the index, the gherkins filed in the wrong place, the rustic loaf hiding under historical foods, a muslin-wrapped pork joint that is itself a replica, nine kinds of fake egg, a chicken leg she considers flawless, artichokes that would not survive scrutiny, a beef tomato she has never seen and still wants to write in about. She sniffs a chewet. She handles real eggs as if they ought to bounce. She once stole three grey plastic fish from a mediocre kitchen display, stored them like a bad conscience, and later gave them to a child. I can take a professional being particular. What I could not take was being asked, at length, to admire the particularity. Every object is an occasion for her to confirm that she is the person who notices. I had noticed. I wanted her to order the stock and dress the rooms.

The palace staff keep putting their heads round the door to ask when she will assemble something so they can cordon a route and print a sign. She tells them this is always her process. She admits, to us, that she is lying. She luxuriates in ledgers. She weeps over a king’s one-page entry and then refuses to quote it, because quoting it would undo the conjuring. Something has happened in her life. The house is quiet. There is a chicken she cannot face, a supermarket queue in which ribs rest on a baby’s foot, an empty chair that is briefly just a chair again, a dream about unshucked oysters and a dead friend. I do not need the grief labelled on page one. I do need the novel to stop using replica ham as a way of not saying it. The archivist appears at her shoulder with more photocopies. They sit with arms pressed together. She promises the senior staff it will all come together in a day or two. In the pages I read, it does not. I started clock-watching in my own kitchen, which is a bad sign with a book and a worse one when you already spend the week chasing people who have said Friday when they meant a target.

Then the book simply becomes a different book. Part II drops you into a young attendant eating a pale pie and a chicken leg while a king dies upstairs. The Queen is already two years dead. Every day the same lady-in-waiting knocks and asks whether His Majesty will eat. The wording changes. The answer is always a performance. The plates return untouched, or reduced only by a taster or a hungry holy man, and the kitchen staff eat the rest. I understood the parallel. The curator would not start; the court keeps asking a question nobody means. Understanding it did not make me want another hundred pages of the delay. The king dies so quietly the attendant cannot believe death can enter a room without moving the curtains. A new king, the third brother, inherits a life he never wanted. Advisors want signatures, appetite, a stomach for blood. He eats like a mouse. People look in through windows and cracks in doors and report what they would see, as if the novel has hired a steward to stand in the corridor and describe the furniture. After a while that is not atmosphere. It is someone refusing to write the scene from inside the room.

I did get as far as the new king signing a death warrant with a shaking hand, ink dripping where the name should be, then watching a father and son killed on a block. The axe catches on the diagonal. Someone in the crowd throws food and keeps chewing. Later the advisors pulp a chicken leg at his table while they laugh about who pissed themselves. I believed his nausea. Then the book went back to cats’ eye-crust, ash on cuffs, uneaten fruit, another morning of pretending not to be awake until someone announces that the King is risen. LOOP is exactly what it sounds like. He looks at a conifer. He listens for birds. The quiet panic arrives on schedule. I put it down there. If the point is that power is a room you cannot leave and nothing happens until it does, I had already been given that point several times, in two centuries, with two lots of chicken that nobody finishes.

What I read is written with a lot of care and almost no forward gear. Short titled fragments, some of them doing one image and stopping. Food described until it curdles. Scent as depth, depth as a dark pool, air that is alive with energy: the same claim, restated, whenever the plot might have had to choose. I do not mind a slow book. I mind a slow book that keeps withholding as if withholding were the work. The curator’s rule is that the people must appear to have just left. In practice the novel does the opposite. Everybody is forever about to begin, about to eat, about to rule, about to assemble the six required rooms. The office staff in the first part are the only people who seemed to me to be living in ordinary time, with a deadline and a public coming through the door, and the book treats them as a nuisance. That annoyed me more than it should have. I spend enough of my week being the person who has to explain why something is still pending.

I stopped because the same mechanism kept repeating and I stopped expecting it to change. Not one big offence. An accumulation. First the catalogue, then the archives as a sort of romance, then a court narrative that is openly about inaction and still asks you to sit with it as if sitting were the achievement. I had seen enough of the voice, the food motif, the looking-through-cracks habit, and the refusal to let anyone own the next step. I cannot judge the lecture, the finished installation, or whether she ever actually dresses those rooms in a way that satisfies her, or the palace, or anyone who paid for a ticket. Those sections come after LOOP. I can judge the stretch I sat with. It took a job I might have found interesting and turned it into being copied into a chain that never names an owner. I closed it on the Saturday, left it on the table, and went to do something that would actually finish.

The first twenty pages of Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King are a supplier catalog. A woman I have not yet been introduced to walks me through a website that sells replica food, and she is thorough: the pork joint wrapped in rigid replica muslin goes for forty-five pounds while a single slice of parma ham costs fourteen, and she has opinions about both. One thing plainly, early: I am going to talk about how this book ends, because the ending is what the whole structure was built to carry. Reviewing it without the ending would be like pricing a job from the brochure. If you would rather find out yourself, stop reading me here. I read it across four evenings of a week when work was following me home, and a novel about fake roast joints should not have survived those evenings. It survived somewhere around the nine kinds of replica eggs, when I realized the catalog was not throat-clearing. It was a work order. The narrator has spent twenty-two years building scenes in historic houses, the roped-off rooms with the bread and the quill, and her inventory talk is how she keeps the world still. By the time she stole three grey plastic fish off a mediocre display at a rival property and took them home in her bag, I had stopped complaining. This is a book about people so good at a narrow craft that the craft stops being a job and turns into a hiding place.

She works to one rule: anyone entering one of her rooms should feel the occupants left thirty seconds ago. Otherwise, her words, it is an arrangement of objects and the scene is dead. I would hire her on that sentence, because it is a deliverable you can actually check. What I did not expect is how fast the book stops being about her and becomes about a man with the opposite problem: a man whose situation is a room he cannot leave.

The middle of the novel drops into a royal household mid-crisis, and Perry builds it out of the staff. My favorite figure might be the lady-in-waiting sent up daily from the kitchens to ask whether the dying King will eat, varying the wording every morning because the substance never changes. The plate comes back untouched either way. I sell service contracts, and I know that ritual: everyone performs the handoff, nobody owns the outcome, the same question climbs the stairs every day and no one can close it. An attendant mistakes a raised head for recovery and announces it to a waiting room; the correction is instant and brutal. And when the King finally dies, he dies so quietly that the room has to be confirmed by committee, ear to mouth.

The man the story then follows is the third brother, the spare's spare, and I was not sold on him at first. He is handed a role he never wanted and does almost nothing in it for a long stretch, and my first reaction was institutional: the council nagging him is not wrong, somebody has to sign things, the country does not run itself. What turned me is that Perry makes the refusal specific. He has already watched himself get reduced once, into, as he puts it, the hole a brother leaves in a seat, and he can see the ledger coming for him exactly the way it came for the so-called Apple King generations earlier, a man flattened into two mocking pages because the court wrote his record.

What the King actually wants is to handle things. He wants to snip the geraniums for his wife with his own fingers, wipe the corner of a cat's eye, feel an egg's weight in his palm. Every object near him gets intercepted and presented to him pre-touched, and when he finally drops an egg and it survives intact, the kitchen converts it to scripture by morning. I repair cassette decks on weekends, so I am not a neutral party on this, but the book's clearest diagnosis is simple: a man wrapped in service so complete that he has been made useless on purpose. The council calls it negligence. The book keeps asking whether it is the first honest reading of that job anyone in the palace has ever done.

The court around him is the comic engine, an unmoderated group chat in lace collars. A maid-of-honour invents a window, reports the King on his knees in front of his young attendant in full production detail, and the palace treats fabrication as wire copy. Investigators summon the Queen's household and ask, in sequence, whether she bleeds, whether the blood is red, whether the sheets look used. It is funny and ugly together, and it is doing real work: the record is not only what gets written down. It is whatever the room agrees to repeat.

Then the King disappears. No coyness: the last movement never says where he went. It supplies theories, and they multiply, poisoned by the Chief Advisor, fled by ship with the Queen, burned in the woods, found grazing beside his riderless horse, while the council sits in a circle unable to move because each man can be sure only of his own version of the truth. Late in the book the structure's trick lands: the six rooms the narrator has been quietly installing are all dressings for the morning of that disappearance. The singed warrant in the grate, signature line blank. One wardrobe open a crack, purple silk inside. A fruit bowl with a single gap left in the mound. I am not embarrassed that the empty space in the fruit bowl got to me.

One real complaint past the catalog. The middle movement repeats itself. The King's despondency is fully established by the time he is weeping over deaths that have not happened, and the rumor chapters keep arriving on the same rhythm: a fresh invention, a listener half skeptical, end scene. Fair enough, the court is supposed to be a loop, and the repetition is building pressure on purpose. But across a book this size there was room to remove a dozen pages without touching the design, and the palace material is so exact elsewhere that the slack shows.

The frame pays out late. The narrator's own loss is never confessed, only staged: the empty chair across the table, a chicken exiled to the freezer, evenings crossing a room fast with the television already on. Near the end the palace calls her in to complain that the research ran long and the finish was rushed, which reads exactly like a bad renewal review, and her answer is to negotiate the props into a fee reduction and take the whole court home in boxes. The final apple she saves for the archivist to place is the argument in one gesture: a record should be finished by more than one hand.

I came to complain about a price list and left arguing with my own habit of trusting whatever got written down. The book understood that a man can refuse the role handed to him and that the refusal can be the only competent thing about him, and it refused to tidy him afterward. It is for readers who can live inside an unsettled ledger; anyone who needs the answer will climb those stairs every day like the lady-in-waiting and get her silence. I finished it Sunday night. Monday I signed something I had been avoiding. Read it.

May We Feed the King builds its first section through accumulation: replica food catalogues, archival fragments, room layouts, recipes, textures, viewing angles, and the curator narrator's rules for making a historical scene feel inhabited rather than arranged. Then it changes mode and enters the imagined court produced by that research, moving among a dying King, his attendants, his successor, the Queen and the people watching them. I should say now that I discuss the first King's death and an execution below. I stopped in Part II at "A BOX WITH A LID," a little after the new King has become trapped in the repetition of refusing his council, so I cannot say what the book eventually does with him or with the framing curator.

The opening should have suited me unusually well. Here is someone whose work depends on discrepancies other people dismiss. She knows the replica-food supplier well enough to know that gherkins are filed under celebration food, not vegetables. She distinguishes a chicken leg convincing enough for close viewing from artichokes that work only at a distance. Her governing rule is practical: a room succeeds when it looks as though its occupants have just left it. That combination of obsessive checking and a very specific purpose made sense to me.

For a while, the detail was the point rather than an obstacle. The rigid replica muslin around a pork joint, the nine kinds of fake egg, the terrible beef tomato and the narrator's irritation at historically important kitchens dressed with generic meat and vegetables all tell us how she sees. Objects are evidence. Placement changes meaning. I also liked that her devotion has an unattractive side. She once stole three bad plastic fish from somebody else's display because she couldn't tolerate them being there. That is much more revealing than simply telling me she is exacting.

But the novel kept explaining this sensitivity after I already understood it.

The palace commission initially gives all that attention somewhere to go. The narrator is hired to construct six scenes for an anniversary whose supposed historical significance nobody has properly verified. She tours the building, meets an archivist, disappears into the records and delays doing the work she was hired to deliver. The palace staff keep asking, reasonably, when the actual installations will start. She keeps researching. That tension interested me because I understood both sides immediately. Her process produces meaning, but somebody still has a deadline and rooms to cordon off.

The archivist also brings out something less controlled in her. Their conversations become charged, and the narrator's attraction is communicated through tiny physical observations: gloves removed finger by finger, an arm pressed against another while reading, the shock of suddenly finding the archivist at her shoulder. At the same time, we learn that the narrator's private life has been devastated by a loss the book deliberately does not explain quickly. Her inability to eat normally, the empty chair at home and the television switched on immediately against the silence gave me more to hold onto than some of the grander statements about imagination and history.

Then she finds the King in the ledger, and Part II effectively inhabits the history she has been constructing. This is a smart structural idea. The dying King's young attendant eats the food his master cannot, watches the King's body deteriorate and carries those images into sex with his wife. A lady-in-waiting repeatedly climbs from the kitchens to ask whether the King might eat today. The answer changes in wording but not substance. He does not eat. Everyone knows the ritual is pointless, and everyone continues it.

That repetition worked once. It did not keep working for me.

After the King dies, his brother inherits a role he never expected and plainly does not want. There is good material here about power as enforced performance rather than freedom. The new King can theoretically command everyone and yet cannot pick a flower himself, choose solitude, ignore paperwork or decline the political meaning assigned to his marriage. His Queen is in love with the Assistant to the Royal Physician, an arrangement the King accepts, while the court treats her body and fertility as state property. The King likes dirt under his nails, his cats, gardens and ordinary handling of things. His advisors want executions, military action, heirs and visible authority.

The problem was that I understood this conflict much earlier than the novel stopped restating it. The King wakes horrified to be King. The council presses him to act. He refuses or delays. Courtiers interpret that refusal as weakness. He wants ordinary physical contact with the world. Then another short section approaches essentially the same situation through a different object, rumour or observer. Even the chapter called "LOOP" announces what I was already experiencing as a reader.

The execution of the imprisoned father and son was the point where the political pressure became concrete enough to recover my attention. The King reluctantly signs the decree after repeatedly avoiding it, then watches the son's botched beheading and the father's immediate death while his advisors later joke about what happened. He understands that his signature can kill people even if he never touches them. That materially changes what his passivity means. Refusing a paper is no longer just personal discomfort with ceremony.

But soon I was back in the same pattern. The King recoils from violence, seeks private moments, gets pushed by the Chief Advisor, thinks about escaping his position and finds comfort with the Queen or the young Attendant. Meanwhile the court generates humiliating sexual rumours and obsesses over whether the Queen will produce an heir. Individual details change. My understanding of the situation mostly did not.

I stopped at "A BOX WITH A LID" because the diminishing return had become predictable. That section again gives us the King's misery and the council's escalating frustration at his inaction, including their insistence that a country requires a ruler who actually rules. I finished it and realised I was no longer asking what the next scene would reveal. I was asking how many more versions of this conflict remained.

There is a particular frustration in abandoning a book whose central character and narrator both care intensely about attention. I had paid attention. I knew why the fake food mattered, why the narrator wanted rooms to appear recently vacated, why the King touched ash and cats, why eating and refusing food carried power, and why his council found his noncompliance intolerable. What I lacked was not comprehension but enough new information to justify continuing.

Maybe the unread portion changes the pace or recontextualises the repetition. I cannot judge that, and I did not read ahead to find out. What I can judge is the substantial portion I read: it repeatedly supplied precise new surfaces for ideas it had already made clear. By "A BOX WITH A LID," precision was no longer keeping me curious. I closed the book there.

Three grey plastic fish. That's what stuck with me after finishing this book. The narrator builds historical room displays, and when she visits somebody else's property and finds three replica fish in a kitchen scene, one color, a seam down the belly, dead eyes, she waits for the room to empty and steals them. I understood her right away. Plain warning: I talk about the ending here, so if you mean to read the book, come back after.

The book is May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry. The narrator, never named, is hired by an old palace to build six period scenes for an anniversary. First she does that work, then the book turns into the story she digs out of the archives, then it comes back to her.

I kept reading because this woman knows her materials the way I know mine. There's a replica food supplier's website she walks through like a man reading a breaker panel. A pork joint in rigid fake muslin, one illusion inside another, 45 pounds. A single plastic oyster, 31.25. A replica leg of venison, 55. She can't explain the pricing and says we shouldn't presume to know the intricacies of another person's craft. I wrote that down.

Her one rule: the room has to look like the people just left, like you missed them by a minute. Otherwise it's dead. My drafting teacher wrote on one of my drawings, accurate is not the same as readable. This woman would understand that. The stolen fish were shaped like fish. They weren't readable.

The writing matches the work. Short titled pieces, some a few pages, some a paragraph. When Perry describes an object, somebody clearly handled it. There's a meat pie, a chewet, so real she sniffed her first order, and years later catches herself smelling her own hand after moving one. That's not showing off. That's noticing what hands do.

First thing that wore on me. Something happened to this woman before the book starts, somebody is gone, and she never says who. Certain things had happened, that's the whole explanation. Empty chair at the table. Can't face a chicken. Crosses the kitchen fast, past the table where we used to sit, straight to the TV. I wouldn't press a man at the supply house. But a book opened the subject. It could have given me a name.

A third in, the book changes trades without warning. We're inside the palace centuries back, a young attendant sneaking food while his king dies in the next room. The whole middle is her imagining, built off one thin ledger entry. A sign on the door would have saved me a chapter.

That king is the best thing in the book. Third brother. Never expected the job, doesn't want it. Won't sign death warrants, won't send men to crush an uprising. His council, men who inherited their chairs same as he did, call him a coward in polite words. And what he wants is small and real. He sweeps his own fireplace in secret, grit under his nails. Wipes the crust from his cat's eyes with his thumb. Reaches for an apple on the branch and somebody steps in to pick it, wash it, polish it.

I know something about having work taken out of your hands for your own good. I'll leave that there.

The honest part: the middle sags. The council complains, the King refuses, rumors circle, repeat with new wallpaper. Same problem, different box. I believe it's on purpose, court life is a loop, and knowing that didn't keep my attention from sliding. Past halfway I caught myself reading faster, which is how I say I skimmed. It picks back up.

The middle is also told at arm's length. You rarely stand in the room. You get what somebody would see through a window, a crack in the door, a rumor retold third-hand. One maid invents a scandal about the King; the other ladies take it apart stitch by stitch. It's like estimating off photographs. Then it hit me: nobody at court gets eyes on him either. The reader waits in the corridor with everybody else. I don't fully forgive it. I see the workmanship.

Watch the eggs. Early on she says replicas ruined real eggs for her, she expects brown eggs to bounce. Later the King, who's never touched an egg, drops one on a stone floor and it doesn't break. It rolls whole and the cook calls it a miracle. I've dropped eggs on kinder floors. They break. Either Perry wrote a small miracle, or a court so hungry to flatter they'd call a cracked egg whole. The book lets both stand. Best joinery in it.

There's a brain under the pretty rooms, about records. Near the end she asks a crowd how we know anything about history. A poem praises a king's victory; the records say he botched it and men died. Why the poem. Paid for, flattery, or to quiet the families. My old foreman made us label what we actually traced, not what we expected to find. The king in the ledger gets two pages and a nickname, the Traitor King, written by people who outlasted him. Whoever holds the pen writes the record.

She tells a true story, I checked: a man named Valletti made resin models of 286 Italian apple varieties in the 1800s. A museum in Turin keeps them. Perfect record, except nobody wrote down the taste. What are apples for, the book asks, if not eating. That one sat with me. I kept my old business cards after the shop closed. You can preserve a thing so carefully you save everything but the use of it.

Two endings, then. In the old story the King and Queen vanish one autumn morning. Beds cold, burnt papers in the grate with one warrant unsigned, a gap in the fruit bowl and an apple rolled into the corner. The court invents every answer: murdered by the chief advisor, fled by ship, a nobleman who swears he found the skeletons in a barn he could never find again. The book refuses to settle it, and the narrator calls the missing ending his gift. Well. I wanted the answer too, but a court full of people inventing the ending they needed felt true.

Her ending is quieter. The palace doesn't need the scenes, a film crew's coming, so she buys the replica food back. Fills her dining room with it, the table where we used to sit. Sets everything but one apple, saved for the archivist to place. The archivist is the love story, gloves coming off one finger at a time, a flapjack split on a bench. Nobody in it says anything direct. I believed it more than romances that say everything.

Last image. She picks up an unfinished embroidery, a king's blue arm that stops at the elbow, needle still threaded, and starts sewing. Twenty years of arranging other people's objects, and the book ends with her making one thing herself. I don't think that's an accident.

So who should read it. Not anybody who wants a story that moves. If you need things to happen and get explained, this will feel like standing at a rope, waiting for a room to speak. Some men I drink coffee with would last ten pages. But if you can sit inside a slow book, if you like watching a careful person do careful work, if you don't need meaning announced so long as the objects are true, this one's for you.

So I land in the middle. Glad I read it. I'll think about the fish, the apple museum, and the King with his cat longer than most books I finish. I would not hand it to everybody.

Depends what you go to a book for. I went in for a story and got a room. Took me a while to stop asking when something would happen. Turned out to be a good room.

May We Feed the King will get shelved with the historical fiction, somewhere between the novels where a queen loses her head and the ones where a king loses his throne, the kind with a map and a family tree in the front and poison by chapter three. I picked it up expecting that, and being wrong about it is most of what I have to say. There is a court in it, and there are corridors, and a king does disappear. But the disappearance is not a mystery the book means to solve, and the court is not really the subject. Before I go further: I am going to talk about the ending, because the ending is where the whole argument of this book sits, and I cannot explain my reaction without it. If you want to go in knowing nothing, stop here.

What it actually is: a first-person account by a woman who has spent twenty-two years arranging replica food and domestic scenes in historic houses. When you see a feast laid out in a great hall, she is the person who placed the pomegranates next to the pie. She takes a commission at a palace marking a vague 750th anniversary, gets access to an unusually complete archive, and becomes absorbed by a king whose ledger entry is a mess of crossings-out, a man the record has reduced to almost nothing. The middle of the book is his story, or her conjuring of it. The frame is hers. I should declare an interest. I spend my weekends building miniature industrial scenery for a model railway, loading yards mostly, and my day job is making long documents consistent in ways nobody notices unless they go wrong. A book about a woman whose one rule is that a scene must look as if the person has just left the room was always going to get a hearing from me. She has what she calls the fresh herb test: if the real herbs in a scene betray that the replica food is an illusion, the scene has failed and she starts again. That is a preflight check, in my language, and I recognised the whole working method. She also knows the supplier catalogue the way I know paper stock. A pork joint in rigid replica muslin costs £45, a single parma ham slice costs £14, and she trusts the discrepancy because, she says, we should never presume to know the intricacies of another person's craft. I have had that exact argument about fold allowances.

Here is where my expectations reversed. I assumed I would tolerate the historical middle section, the king's story, as the price of the curator's company, and that the curator's chapters would be where I felt at home. It went the other way. Part II, the court story, has genuine pull: a dying king who will not eat, a lady-in-waiting sent up every day to ask the same pointless question in different words, a third brother who never expected to rule and refuses to do it on anyone's terms, will not sign death warrants, will not crush an uprising, will not perform appetite or violence. When his chief advisor sends the army against the island rebels without his approval, and the king answers with the only order he ever gives, mercy, I was properly hooked. The young attendant who watches all of this is the best thing in the book, a man who concludes there must be something wrong either with him or with everyone else, because his face changes and theirs do not. I read the middle third faster than I have read anything in months. Meanwhile the narrator's own prose, which I had expected to love, started to wear me down. Everything in it is like something else. The king enters his chamber like thread through the eye of a needle. Panic arrives like a stone dropped in a pond. He is a moth and the candle is in constant motion. He is circled like injured prey on a mountaintop. His heart thrashes like a fish held at the gills. Individually, fine. Accumulated over three hundred pages, I wanted the book to let a thing be itself now and then. There is a simile to be made here about a book that can only describe one thing in terms of another, and I am aware of the irony, so I will leave it.

Under the craft talk there is grief, and the book handles it the way I prefer, through objects rather than statements. Something happened to the narrator before the book begins. She calls it her circumstances changing, her past life, the devastation of it. A friend asks how she is getting on being alone in the house. That is all you get. Who left, or who died, is never said, and I respect that, because what the book does instead is put the feeling into a chicken she cannot face and has to freeze, into a vacuum-packed rack of ribs resting against a baby's bare feet at the checkout, into the empty chair opposite hers at the dining table. Halfway through, the chair starts to feel, she says, like a chair again, simply vacant, and not a void. Her recurring dream involves placing two unshucked oysters in front of a stranger whose friend has died, and who is trying to honour them by being brave. The book never explains the dream and never needs to. I am not someone who wants feelings explained to me at length, and this book does not explain them. It arranges them. The same method carries the other thread, the archivist, who arrives as a professional courtesy and becomes, by small degrees, the person the book is secretly about. Two people leaning over documents with their arms pressed together, making, in her phrase, a double-width human. The narrator has a second recurring dream, about being lowered into dark water in a Perspex box, and she mentions almost in passing that she has not had it since the day she met the archivist. That is the whole love story, delivered as an aside, and it works because the book has spent two hundred pages proving that objects and habits can carry weight.

Which is why the lecture chapter annoyed me. In Part III the narrator gives a talk at the palace, titled The Question of Preservation, and explains to an audience of forty how we know anything about history: records, letters, songs, propaganda. She tells them about Garnier Valletti, who made resin and wax replicas of 286 varieties of apple in nineteenth-century Italy, and how the replicas preserve everything except the taste, which is the part apples are for. The best moment in the chapter is not even hers. The archivist, unable to help themselves, suggests that Valletti did it to make us confront, one day, what we have lost, and the narrator lets it hang in the air and calls it perfect. It is. It is also the thesis of the whole book, stated outright, in case anyone missed it. And that is my problem: the lecture is the novel explaining its own design. In my job, if you have to explain the layout, the layout has not worked. The strange thing is that the book already contains a better version of the same argument, in the epilogue, when the palace staff call her in to complain. The research took too long. The archivist was drafted in too late. The needle hanging from the embroidery thread: who would realistically see it, and if they did, who would ascribe it any meaning. The original medieval cloak, visible only through a crack in a wardrobe door. I have had this meeting. Everyone who does invisible work has had this meeting. The meeting dramatises everything the lecture states, and one of them should have been cut, and it is not the meeting.

The scenes themselves, described room by room near the end, are where I stopped arguing and started taking notes. In the kitchens, a pig on the spit with its head on a butchery block in the far corner, a quince in its mouth, the body seeming to reach the length of the room for its own head. In the Queen's parlour, an unfinished embroidery of a woman beside an orange tree, and on the other side of the tree a second hand, a man's cuff, the arm cut off at the elbow, the blue thread running taut over the edge of the table with the needle still attached, hanging, moving when the air moves. Four screwed-up balls of parchment under the bed, visible only if you stand at the largest window. In the attendant's quarters, a small meat pie, quartered, one quarter gone. I build things at 1:76 scale and I am telling you the discipline here is real. Every object is doing narrative work. The palace staff asked who would realistically see the needle. I would see the needle. That is the whole argument, and the book wins it with me in the rooms, not in the lecture.

And then the ending, which I warned you about. The king vanishes. The queen vanishes. Her lover may or may not have gone with them. The book offers half a dozen theories, poison, flight, a managed abdication, a coup, and refuses to choose. The narrator, projecting the king's ledger entry at her lecture, calls the lack of an ending his great gift, a great fuck you to everyone who tries to manhandle ambiguity into order. I have two reactions and I cannot fully reconcile them. The first is that she is right, and the proof is the scenes she builds, which are made entirely of the ambiguity: a fruit bowl piled with abundance except for one empty space, phantom fruit, an unsigned warrant to execute in a dead fire, a single apple in the corner of the room mostly hidden by a curtain hem. The second is that there is a difference between an open ending and a book declining to end, and Part II sets up a genuinely gripping question and then steps back and tells you the question is the point. I bought the argument and I also felt managed. Both are true. What settles it for me, mostly, is the last chapter, when the boxes arrive at her house and she rebuilds the scenes around her own dining table. She tries the king's tankard in four different places before it settles. She replaces the pressed birch leaf in his prayer book with a leaf snipped from her bay tree. She negotiates the palace's leftover props into a fee reduction, and asks as if the thought has just occurred to her, while admitting she had thought of little else since the project ended. I recognised that move. And she has stolen, before the final meeting, a silver fork with a single pomegranate seed impaled on the left prong, because, she says, it would have been too great a risk to take nothing. The last apple goes on the corner of the table and stays there, in readiness, she says, for the archivist doing the honours. The book ends mid-gesture, and I minded that less than I expected to.

So whether I can recommend it depends entirely on who is asking. If you make things, scenery, layouts, anything where the detail is the point and nobody will ever know, this book will feel like being seen, and you should read it. I would lend it to Ruth from my scenery group tomorrow. If you want momentum, resolution, a mystery that gets solved, or if relentless simile does your head in, you will want to shake this book by the shoulders somewhere around page one hundred, and you should read something else. My brother would last twenty pages. The book tells you itself who it is for. The narrator says the ink in her scenes may be purple, and even though no one can see it in the straightforward sense, one in a thousand people will sense it, and it is those people she holds in her mind. That is arrogant and also true, and whether you find it lovely or maddening is precisely the question the book is asking. I finished it glad it exists. I am not sure I would have finished it if I knew less about placing objects. The apple is still on the corner of the table, waiting. Make of that what you will, which is, not to be too cute about it, the entire book.