Professor Wala Kitu, a mathematician that specialises in Nothing, is approached by billionaire John Sill, who wants to become a real-life Bond villain, to help him rob Fort Knox. But it’s not the gold Sill is after but something more valuable: nothing.
Percival Everett’s follow-up to his Booker-shortlisted novel The Trees is another literary take on a popular genre - previously it was the crime thriller and this time it’s the spy thriller and specifically the James Bond books. And, like The Trees, I didn’t dislike Dr. No but I didn’t love it either.
The novel is chock-full of Bond references, as you’d expect. The premise of breaking into Fort Knox is the same as Goldfinger’s and one of the characters is called Auric, Goldfinger’s first name. Sill kills one of his subordinates by dumping his chair through the floor into a shark tank, one of the most iconic Bond villain moments, and there’s exotic locations a-plenty throughout, a prominent feature in all Bond stories.
The title of course is the same as the sixth novel in the series and the first of the movies. I’ve not read the Ian Fleming book and I saw the movie when I was a kid so, aside from the scene everyone remembers from that movie, I can’t recall anything in it, so I can’t say if there are specific references from Fleming’s Dr. No in Everett’s.
The only major absence is that of a Bond-type character. Wala is more of an unwilling villain henchman than a Bond stand-in (and the namesake of the book - he has a doctorate in “nothing” so he’s Dr. No). There are alphabet agency characters that pop up every now and then but none who stand out as an obvious Bond-proxy.
The question is: why is Everett doing a Bond-style novel full of Bond references? I can’t say for sure but I can speculate that perhaps this is a pastiche of Bond novels, and others like it, in saying that they’re ultimately about nothing, ie. empty and pointless. The female characters appear hypnotised/drugged quite often, possibly reflecting the wooden/one-dimensional writing of female characters in these kinds of stories. But would Everett really write an entire novel taking the piss out of Bond novels, stories that nobody really takes seriously to begin with? I’ve no idea but then I don’t know what else he could be doing here - maybe it’s a post-modern take on Bond?
I got the impression from The Trees that Everett was a writer with a major chip on his shoulder about racism but he manages to limit himself on that subject here with only a few mentions of it in the story. The main one is Sill’s motivation for getting even with America, and another, sillier one is naming his white butler a black-sounding name, DeMarcus, for no reason.
The book is well-written and mostly easy to read. I wouldn’t call it a boring narrative but it’s not a riveting one either - Wala travels with Sill around the world, listening to Sill do his villain thing, and, perhaps appropriately (deliberately?) for a novel with Nothing at its core, nothing much happens. Parts of it feel irrelevant, like Wala getting a car, and there’s a lot of doctorate-level maths talk that I didn’t follow at all.
Speaking of which, the concept of “nothing” and harnessing it was way too abstract to understand - like how a box of nothing could be so potent or how Sill was able to enact nothing on a town using a telescope, or something? All that “nothing” talk is a bit Abbott & Costello too. “What are you a professor of?” “Nothing” “...”, “What are you trying to get?” “Nothing” “... and when you get it - what do you expect to happen?” “Nothing” “...”.
The ending is both clever and anticlimactic. You’re expecting it but hoping it’ll be more than it is. What’s going to happen at the end of a story about nothing? Exactly. At the same time, aren’t most Bond endings equally as forgettable in their predictability? And this one has the fourth wall-breaking of being the point where you put the novel down, having finished it, thus enforcing the conclusion’s totality.
Wala mentions that he’s on the Autism spectrum so if you enjoy reading novels in the voice of someone on the spectrum (a growing popular sub-genre in modern literature - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Convenience Store Woman, Graeme Simsion’s Rosie books et al.), check this one out.
I liked Wala and the idea of someone wanting to become a Bond villain. The novel is accessible and has clever and amusing moments throughout. But the story’s inscrutability, both in its core concept and what we’re meant to make of it, made it less impressive for me. Overall, I found Percival Everett’s Dr. No to be more of a Dr. Not Bad.
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