OBSERVER:

“Mr Firbank always had a sense of style and a feeling for the mannered beauty of arranged words.... In Santal the passion for beautiful writing is still evident, but it is used with greater simplicity to achieve an effect such as a more reticent Pierre Loti might manage.... Mr Firbank has emotion rather than passion, and his East is viewed through a slight haze of sentiment; but it is a real country, and has its own spiritual excitements.”

GLASGOW EVENING NEWS:

“Mr Firbank has acquired a reputation as a stylist which this work will enhance. Within its brief compass there is all the glamour, the colour, the heat, the smells, the vileness, the beauty, and the fervour of Islam. It is the sort of thing that Loti does on a grander scale, and, like Loti, Mr Firbank is an adept at the creation of atmosphere. He is guilty of a few affectations perhaps, but these are like precious flaws in a wondrous Turkish carpet—they are lost in the beauty of the design as a whole.”

LIVERPOOL DAILY POST:

“Mr Ronald Firbank has always had his own manner, and a very modish one. In Santal the elegance, almost dandyism, of his style has given just a faint hint of flippancy to a tale in itself very dignified, and full of an unexpected warmth and delicacy of feeling. It is a nouvelle—who could call a thing of such distinction a long short story?—with the vivid richly-coloured background of the East.... Something there is, too, of irony and detachment, as though the Mr Firbank of Valmouth and of The Princess Zoubaroff were secretly smiling a little cynically at his unexpected tumble into sentiment.”

SOUTHPORT GUARDIAN:

“The incense of Santal pervades the book throughout. Mr Firbank is a discriminating artist; he has an exotic sense of words and of colour. Seldom have we met in so short a space so intense a characterisation of pilgrimage or so vivid a picture of the Algerian scene.”

TIMES:

“Mr Firbank here drops his artificiality and gives a vividly real study of an Eastern city ... a vivid glimpse of a world strange—to a European—but convincingly true.”