FICTION
Dr No
Percival Everett
Text, $32.99

American novelist Percival Everett’s career stretches back to the mid-’80s and has won him critical respect, though not the profile he deserves. It may be that Everett’s wildness and unpredictability have counted against him.

Among his extensive back catalogue is a novel narrated by a baby versed in literary theory (Glyph), a fantasy that begins with a decapitated man coming back to life (American Desert), a Western about a gay hate crime (Wounded), and the winningly titled A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid, about, what else?, an intriguing book proposal from the famous pro-segregationist senator. In any case, things are starting to change: his last novel, The Trees, was shortlisted for the Booker, and in the US Dr No has appeared on many 2022 best-of lists.

It is also true that a black writer who doesn’t always deal with race, or decentres it or deals with it in oblique forms, may find himself falling or being shoved through the cracks. In fact, Everett’s 2001 satire Erasure is about just this: a somewhat neglected black highbrow novelist is so enraged by the success of a bogus work of ghetto fiction that he produces his own, thereby garnering the attention and prizes that have previously eluded him.

The Trees, though, is anything but oblique: it’s a horror novel on the theme of Emmett Till and other victims of lynching, where the perpetrators or their descendants are found dead and accompanied by the body of the person who was lynched.

Like The Trees, Dr No uses pop culture, but rather than horror it draws, as the title tells us, from James Bond. There is a supervillain here, but he isn’t the titular character. That’s our hero, Wala Katu (“Wala is Tagalog for nothing, though I am not Filipino. Katu is Swahili for nothing, though my parents are not from Tanzania”), who does, in fact, have a doctorate: he is a mathematics professor who specialises in nothing.

The supervillain is called John Sill and he wants Wala’s help breaking into Fort Knox; true to type, he has his own submarine and under his conference room there is a shark pool into which he drops poorly performing henchmen. He is black, as well, and his stated motivation is to revenge himself on the racist country that murdered his parents, not to mention Doctor King, these murders all being connected. As it is right there on the back cover I don’t know it’s much of spoiler to say that his most ambitious plan is to wipe out a whole town – to reduce it to nothing.

Before we get there, though, there are riffs and running jokes deriving from the ambiguity of that word “nothing”: an absence, or a presence? Not absolutely nothing, but positively nothing? “Nothing is important.” “I was a charlatan. I knew nothing, but given that was my chosen topic, I was a successful fraud, a real, fake expert, an expert fake, a fake with real expertise…” “I had nothing to lose.”