However, some reviewers have been more modest in their praise. E. F. Bleiler noted that the novel included "many stylistic brilliances, but the story suffers from too many shifts of attention". Jo Walton commented that it "is probably best described as good but odd. isn’t at his best writing characters, which gets peculiar at novel length. What he could do, what he did better than anyone, was to take poetic images and airy tissues of imagination and weight them down at the corners with perfect details to craft a net to catch dreams in. It’s not surprising he couldn’t make this work for whole novels, when as far as I know, nobody else has ever quite made it work in prose."