
Cult novelist Percival Everett’s latest book Dr No appears hot on the heels of his Booker-shortlisted Mississippi crime parody The Trees, which tackled brutal racism in the Deep South. Dr No is narrated by one Wala Kitu: a Black maths professor who is, nevertheless, an expert in absolutely nothing (‘wala’ and ‘kitu’ each translate as ‘nothing’ in Tagalog and Swahili respectively). Indeed, the notion of nothingness crops up a few times in Dr No.
We soon find out that Kitu is in fact Ralph Townsend – the gifted child from Everett’s 1999 novel Glyph, now grown up. Kitu gets roped into a scheme by Black billionaire and aspirational Bond villain John Sill – whose parents were murdered for knowing too much about the circumstances of Martin Luther King’s assassination, and who aspires to create a weapon of mass destruction and erase Washington DC. In his words, “This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”
Joining Kitu and Sill on this journey are maths department buddy Eigen Vector and a one-legged dog. Nefarious events follow: shady deals with even shadier characters, private jets, sharks and a killer android. A hilarious spoof, Dr No is a book about nothing – or nihilism – through the lens of racial injustice, and is further proof that Percival Everett is a master of complex, satirical tales that bite.
Dr No, Percival Everett (Influx)
Price: £9.99. Info: here
words DAVID NOBAKHT
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