 Upon publication it was a critical success, but later Garner had begun to find fault, referring to it in a 1968 interview as "a fairly bad book" and in 1970 as "one of the worst books published in the last twenty years... technically... inept".Writing in 1981, Neil Philip noted that it had become "fashionable to condemn Garner's early work, perhaps because of his own dismissive attitude to it.