Dr No by Percival Everett review: a bonkers love-it-or-hate-it riff on Bond

Dr No 
by Percival Everett

The American novelist Percival Everett writes quicker than some of us can read. I am no slouch but I’ve only just finished his previous book, The Trees – a truly shocking crime/horror/comedy/revenge drama about racism in Mississippi – which was shortlisted for (and really should have won) the Booker Prize last year. By my reckoning, Everett’s new book, Dr No, is his 23nd novel – he also writes short stories and poetry – and it’s just as strange, as disturbing and as weirdly satisfying as all the rest. Everett may not be as prolific as, say, Stephen King – he is certainly not as well known – but he is just as weirdly consistent.

For anyone not familiar with Everett’s work, he’s the kind of experimental writer who’s not so much difficult to read as just plain odd. “I’d love to write a novel everyone hated,” he once told an interviewer. Be careful what you wish for, Everett, one might think – but you could never accuse him of being a people-pleaser. He writes what one might describe as “fictional” fiction – rather than fictionalised non-fiction, that semi-autobiographical, sub-realist mode that today tends to dominate what we think of as literary fiction.

Everett’s Telephone (2020) was a kind of build-your-own adventure compendium, coming in three different published versions; I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) featured a character called Not Sidney Poitier; God’s Country (1994) was a parody western; and The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson of Roanoke, VA, 1843: Annotated From the Library of John C Calhoun (2019), my personal favourite, is styled as a mock-historical handbook for slave owners. These books aren’t just books, they are clearly part of an ongoing project. In Everett’s oeuvre, if that’s not too grand a term, there are always overarching narrative themes or issues which are being addressed, usually concerning matters of race, gender and class. Suffice it to say, if you are looking for one of those worthy, dreary, personal, sub-realist kinds of a novel, Dr No is definitely not it.

What exactly it is… well, as always with Everett, it’s difficult to describe. It’s all a bit spoofy and wacky. It’s not exactly a homage to Ian Fleming’s Dr No nor the 1962 film, but it does share certain characteristics: there’s a crazy villain in his lair; there’s a ridiculous submarine; there are loads of henchmen; there are some scantily clad ladies. But that’s where the Bond resemblances end and things start to get really weird. The narrator calls himself Wala Kitu, but tells us in passing his actual name is Ralph Townsend – a nod to another Everett novel, Glyph. He’s a professor of maths at Brown University and specialises in the study of nothing – as in naught, zero, hence Dr No. The supervillain in his lair, meanwhile, is a billionaire named John Sill who has hired Kitu to assist him in his ambition of becoming a “a Bond villain” – “a cultural disease, an enemy of the system” – in revenge for the murder of his father, which is connected with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And there is a character called Bill Clinton, who is not Bill Clinton. And a cosmologist priest called Father Karras. And a brilliant topologist named Eigen Vector. And a one-legged dog named Trigo whom Kitu drags around in a wheelie-cart or straps to his chest in a baby carrier and who talks to Kitu in his dreams. There is also a death-ray type weapon – a “complex projective plane orbiter”. And a mysteriously meaningful empty box. And a plan to burgle Fort Knox. “What is this?” Kitu asks Vector towards the end of the book. “This is crazy,” she replies. “I love it.”

Yep. And you will or you won’t. As usual, Everett’s daring and exuberance allow him to play around with genre conventions while also skipping off on any intellectual detour or adventure that happens to take his fancy, including firing off a whole load of random potshots at the government, the function of money, book collecting, university life – the list goes on, because of course a book about nothing can be about anything: “You will pardon my indulgent aside. It, in fact, comes from nowhere, from nothing.” The great, troubled Malcom Lowry once described fellow novelist William Gaddis’s encyclopaedic masterpiece The Recognitions (1955) – the experimental novel to beat all experimental novels – as “a superbyzantine gazebo”. This is more like a sprint in a maze.

Yet for all the high-energy high jinks, Dr No seems also deeply – interestingly – self-accusatory, which will only make you love it or hate it even more. At a certain point in the novel Kitu suddenly finds himself “wondering what I was doing with my finite life, realising that I was a fraud, that I could talk to my colleagues for hours about things I simply didn’t understand, that I could fill a board with a proof that might make them ooh and aah, but had no meaning, no truth, no purpose. And the more wrong the noodling was, the more impressed they were. I was a charlatan.” Maybe I wasn’t reading it right: maybe Dr No should be read as a confession or an apologia pro vita sua. Or maybe, as with any good book, I was never really reading Dr No at all. Dr No was reading me.