[2] Laura Miller in Salon.com wrote: "This is a tale of eternal, essential, human folly, hilarious and endlessly inventive, like a cross between a Pynchon novel and 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' reincarnated on African soil.

An allegory presented as a modern-day folk tale (complete with tricksters, magic, disguised lovers and daring escapes), it represents Ngũgĩ's attempt to scrutinize his homeland by borrowing the same postcolonial magnifying glass that writers like Salman Rushdie and Derek Walcott have trained on India and the Caribbean.

'"[5] The Guardian′s reviewer Maya Jaggi writes that "realism is not the chosen weapon in a novel whose absurdist, scatological satire is reminiscent of Alfred Jarry's Ubu plays, or Carlos Fuentes's novelistic skewering of Mexico's Machiavellis in The Eagle's Throne.

At more than 700 pages, its flaws, of obsessive reiteration and prolixity, arise partly from its bold experimentation with oral forms, and from giving rein to the pathologies of the corrupt at the expense of the more intimate dilemmas of those who challenge them.

Apart from its substantial length and the prodigious feats of both linguistic dexterity and imaginative fertility displayed by Ngũgĩ in the course of telling his incredible tale, the book is simply a most impressive example of pure African storytelling.