Hang onto your hats, gentle readers; suspend your disbelief; and prepare to enter the world of a mathematics professor who studies nothing, makes nothing his life’s work, and believes nothing.
Wala Kitu (each name meaning ‘nothing’ in different languages, but with the real name Ralph Townsend) lives a quiet life as a professor at Brown University, Rhode Island, as an expert on nothing, and he does nothing about it.
Enter John Sill, billionaire baddie, who yearns to be a James Bond villain. He enlists the good professor’s help, with a three million dollar cheque, to break into Fort Knox where there is a box containing nothing, which will help him wreak revenge on the USA for the way it treated his parents.
Sill, with money inherited from his mother, who made it from prostitutes and property, has all the requisite toys of the multi-millionaire … a private jet, his own helicopter and submarine, even a modest yacht. Oddly, he does not actually need Kitu’s help to break into Fort Knox. But that is nothing to worry about.
With tongue firmly planted in his cheek, Everett sends up the whole idea of a criminal trying to get his own wicked way, with bodies a-plenty, gunfire, even a shark pool beneath a meeting room into which an under-achiever is tipped. There are mathematical allusions that may or may not be valid, and Kitu’s most enlightening conversations come in dreams where he chats with his one-legged dog, Trigo. Because of his missing limbs, Trigo must be carried everywhere, but Kitu’s clever colleague, Eigen Vector, adores him. She thinks she also wants to be a Bond villain but spends a good deal of the novel either brainwashed by Sill or drugged.
Dr No is a glorious romp, with Everett making a good deal of something out of nothing.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books, most recently The Trees (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Telephone (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize).
