Critics found the book private, idiosyncratic, and difficult; Jenny Turner admired its Buntingesque construction but disliked its biblical tone.

The Tolkien scholar Jason Fisher likened it to a baptism of folklore that demanded work from the reader, but found that worth the effort.

Edward’s father, Sir John, sees working-class literacy and community rituals as threats, and gets William convicted on a charge of trespass.

Taking Murrangurk’s name, he stays for thirty years, becoming a "feather-foot" - arbitrating in disputes, carrying out justice, and performing the "dreaming" rituals.

[1] She praises the novel as "constructed like a Buntingesque prose poem of continuity and rupture, environment and myth", commenting that the dialogue "is stunningly harsh and bare, forcing the reader to work and think and learn".

[1] She criticizes the "Aboriginal episodes" as "the usual anthropological nonsense, dotted with that giveaway primitive-peoples linguistic marker, the biblical cadence.

[1] The author and folklorist Neil Philip, writing in Signal, states that Garner "clearly regards" the real-life William Buckley as his "spiritual ancestor".

In Philip's view, that makes Strandloper heavy with private meaning, and accordingly "hard to gauge": he supposes that the first page will cause many readers to give up, and that this was intentional on Garner's part.

[3] In his University of Oxford PhD thesis, the scholar of Welsh mythology Felix Taylor writes that "Garner’s depiction of aboriginal cultures, first in Australia in Strandloper and then back in Cheshire in Boneland, develops ideas of rootedness in a local landscape which also connects him to the spirit of his ancestors."

Taylor notes that Garner had studied Welsh mythology in relation to his native Cheshire, and had then expanded his "idiosyncratic" understanding of this "into a wider conception of a universal mythic consciousness".