Dr No is a 2022 novel by Percival Everett. It’s about a maths professor Wala Kitu who studies nothing, as in the concept of nothing. A super villain in the James Bond manner tries to recruit Wala to help in a scheme to break into Fort Knox and steal the stock of nothing which he believes is kept there. The plan is then to use this nothing as a weapon, negating whatever a super villain wants to negate.

When a book considers an unfamiliar topic, I sometimes do a bit of background research before starting a review. I didn’t know much about nothing, but was vaguely aware that people are studying the subject at MIT. So I tried to do an internet search on that, which turned out to be a bit tricky. A Google search for ‘Are scientists at MIT studying nothing?’ resulted in one of those AI summaries which announced indignantly: ‘No, scientists at MIT are not studying nothing, they are studying a whole range…’ with subjects listed. Next I tried: ‘Are scientists at MIT studying the concept of nothing?’ A mollified AI then did a U-turn, telling me about the MIT scientist Daniel Harlow and his studies of profound absence. So, no people are MIT are not studying nothing, and yes they are.

All I can say is that nothing, which might seem to be the simplest of things, as in the absence of any complications whatsoever, turns out to be very complicated. It all started with Otto von Guericke who in 1654 invented a pump that could suck the air out of a hollow copper sphere. In a demonstration of the power of nothing he had two teams of horses trying and failing to pull apart two halves of his copper sphere containing a vacuum. Since then researchers have defined other types of ever more rarified nothing. I won’t go into details. Suffice to say, a subject that seemed simple is really not.

Dr No revolves around these head spinning paradoxes, which makes for a funny, surreal, and philosophical read. This is a book about nothing. You could write a great deal about that; or you could leave it there. Nothing is fiendishly complicated and reassuringly simple. You can take both from Dr No, a spy story with all the easy cliches, which also takes you on a mind boggling journey through the contradictions of nothing which seem to lie beneath everything.

I reserved Miranda July’s All Fours at the library after hearing it was a road trip book, and had been included on the Women’s Prize for Fiction list.

I soon realised this was not a road trip book. A woman, who has had some sort of successful, unspecified artistic career, reaches her forties and feels herself at a turning point. She decides to go on a solo road trip across America, but only gets as far as a motel about half an hour from home. Here she has a kind of highly creative breakdown, employing her significant personal wealth and febrile imagination to turn her humble motel room into luxury accommodation over three days of intense effort. She then spends the next few weeks in her special room, enjoying the company of a younger man. Their affair is described in the sort of detail that Henry Miller might have used in Tropic of Cancer, if Miller’s protagonist had been a neat and tidy Californian woman rather than a seedy New York man living in Paris. Anyway, following her motel sojourn, the woman returns home and desperately tries to carry on with her normal life, pretending to her husband that her state of acute distraction is due to the menopause. And then, as if fate is having its fun, a routine medical check-up reveals that she is actually approaching this time in her life.

Rather than a road trip, All Fours is about women dealing with the menopause. Although I did wonder at this point if I was the intended audience, I kept reading. Partly this was to learn something about an experience that was not my own. All Fours is very much about the specificity of experience. As well as facing the menopause, which is specific to women, the narrator also recalls suffering a very rare complication during the birth of her child, which causes almost all of the baby’s blood to drain back into the mother. Against all odds the baby survives, but this traumatic experience stays with its mother, so that she is always looking for the few people in the world who would understand what she had been through.

So is this book actually for woman who have suffered the rare birth complication known as fetal maternal haemorrhage?

To answer that question, notice I have not mentioned the name of the narrator. This is because she isn’t given one. The lack of a name goes along with her mysterious job, never fully described. There is a lack of specificity here – like the narrator is ‘Everywoman’ or something. It makes you wonder if the fact that we all experience life slightly differently constitutes our common ground.

The trend in fiction writing is towards fragmentation, with different books designed for different groups of people. Of course people have always read novels to take them outside their normal experience, just as they’ve always wanted to go on road trips to new and unfamiliar places. But every road trip eventually brings you home again, and a novel, if it’s good, will still reflect something that we all tend to recognise as familiar. And maybe that sense is more important than ever. All Fours does both specific and general in a very interesting way.

The book might not be to everyone’s taste, but it still manages to take the individuality of taste and make you think about it, combining sparky wit with affecting emotion, particularly in the first half. I’m glad I read it.

The Wizard of Earthsea is Ursula Le Guin’s 1968 novel about a young wizard.

We now know that young wizard stories grew up into a bit of a monster, but here we see the idea in its innocent infancy, and perhaps notice some revealing differences. Later versions saw the wizard world becoming a kind of elite, secret society, fed by a school seemingly modelled on Eton. I remember reading this kind of story with my daughter, feeling uneasy about the fact that most people are classified as boring and non-magical. Hang on a minute, I thought to myself, while wizards are flying around on broomsticks, ordinary, non-magical folk have worked out how to fly to the moon. Why present magic as something denied to most people?

The Wizard of Earthsea actually accommodates such reservations. Rather than taking a secret train to a clandestine school, Ged, a promising, young Earthsea wizard, takes the oars alongside non-magical crew on a boat, as he sails to a well known magic school on the island of Roke. After completing his education, he and his fellow students then go to various jobs around the Earthsea archipelago. Like GPs, school teachers, or vets, they are part of their communities, respected (usually) but not fundamentally different to other people. At one point Ged uses a spell to keep a shoddy boat together, but makes it clear a competent shipwright would do a better job of repairs.

This was an important aspect of a book which characteristically presents different elements of life, as complementary parts of a whole. Magic is about a balance. You can stop the wind by magic in one place, but that will make wind blow harder somewhere else – a bit like the real weather really, where you can’t have high pressure without a corresponding low. And the central struggle of the book is young Ged’s battle with the dark side of himself rather than with some external enemy.

I would suggest later versions of the young wizard story lost something when magical GPs, who used their particular skills to help humanity in general were replaced by wizards going to a secret school, divided into competing, self-regarding houses, educated to work for their own closed society. A sign of divided times perhaps, or at least authors with different outlooks. Similarly, Le Guin did not see her apparent children’s story as just for children. She didn’t really believe in such literary pigeon-holing. Since the 1960s, fiction writing has become highly fragmented into different categories of stories for different categories of people. However, in Earthsea, magical and non-magical people do not seem to have different songs or stories. The fact that a child or adult would have an equal chance of enjoying the Wizard of Earthsea is a reflection of what this book is about.