Perhaps Percival Everett’s The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, made readers realise what an astonishing writer he is. But there is certainly a great backlist. I am particularly fond of Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and American Desert in his satirical vein; and Suder, Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded in his more elegiac and contemplative tone. Dr. No seems to be in his Menippean form, until you realise just how seriously he is joking. I have often thought that a joke is not funny until it stops being funny, when it becomes hilarious, and this novel exemplifies that.
The central character is not actually called Wala Kitu, two words from Tagalog and Swahili that both mean nothing. He is a professor of mathematics, whose speciality is the idea of nothing, though, as he would be quick to point out, even an idea of nothing is not nothing. He is dreamy, and speaks to his one-legged dog in his dreams (yes, you read that correctly), discussing whether the nothing he has in his hand is bigger than the nothing in the dog’s single paw. The gag runs from the start: what do you work on? Nothing. What interests you? Nothing. What do you care about? Nothing. It might seem like Thomas Bernhard or Edward Albee until it goes madcap.
Wala Kitu is approached by John Sill, who offers him ludicrous sums of money because he very much wants nothing. Specifically, he wants to be a Bond villain and to weaponise nothing. Kitu goes along with this, since nothing really matters. The caper is beautifully choreographed, and has a number of little winks to the Fleming oeuvre – a character called Auric, for example; tanks that might or might not be full of sharks; and a plot to invade Fort Knox.
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