One Zero and The Night Controller

by Michael Westlake

228 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1980

About the author

Michael Westlake was born in 1942 and read philosophy at the London School of Economics, worked as a mathematics tutor and a taxi driver, researcher in an American think tank, journalist and lecturer in film studies.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mike Westlake, one of the underread heroes of British experimental fiction (show me a finer British avant-garde novel than Imaginary Women or 51 Soko, and I’ll show you my impacted bicuspid), kicked off a short-lived career with this comic novel about an altiloquent philophastering cabbie and an alluring ex-prostitute night controller (one who dispatches cabs). One Zero, the cabbie, is accosted by Mr. Machiavelli, whom he assists in discovering his teenage lover Kaffee through the murk of late 1970s London. The narrator’s deliberate ponderousness allows for Westlake to perform the feats of prose gymnastics for which he became famous (to me), although unlike in later novels, the plot lacks ludic density, and the novel tends to meander, although mostly pleasantly. Westlake was a cabbie in a past life, and the life of an intellectual caught in the slipstream of the underworld is evoked with panache.