Though this is the early part of an unfinished novel, reviewers examined it. Some took the opportunity to look back at the whole series of completed novels, 6,443 pages by one count. They are pleased to see that Sam Panda, Aubrey's son from his "long-legged youth" and now going by Sam Mputa, his mother's last name, is a papal nuncio, and that Maturin pursues Christine Wood and again sees his daughter Brigid, who is beginning to hold her own with her older cousins, the Aubrey twin girls. The sailors and the families of Maturin and Aubrey get as far as the island of Saint Helena, where Napoleon is firmly exiled, and there the writing stops, with no hint of what might have happened in South Africa, had the squadron arrived there. There is wide acclaim for the Afterword by Richard Snow, included in the book.