In "The Observer", Tim Adams complimented the opening sections as "nicely layered with the pretensions of a particular precocious kind of student" but criticised the "predictability" of Mountstuart's "walk-on part in literary history" and ultimately the suspension of disbelief, particularly the Baader-Meinhoff passages, concluding "For all the incident, for all the change he witnesses, Mountstuart never really feels like a credible witness either to history or emotion." Tom Cox in "The Daily Telegraph" disagreed: he praised the characterisation, calling Mountstuart "a man whose fragile egotism and loose-fitting story has you frequently forgetting you're reading fiction, and even more frequently forgetting you're reading at all." Giles Foden, in "The Guardian", found the New York art-scene sections weakest, saying they "puncture the realism Boyd has so carefully built up in the rest of the novel." Michiko Kakutani agreed that Mountstuart's youth was well evoked, but that the description of his retirement and poverty was "as carefully observed and emotionally resonant". While in the early part of the book "the characters' marionette strings carefully hidden", later Boyd tried to play God, resulting in "an increasingly contrived narrative that begins to strain our credulity."