him that the Dreaming has been preserved: it is William's role to take it to his own home, for another person to take up later. As a token, Bungil gives William a ritual woomera spear-thrower. Back in Cheshire, William finds that the old community ritual has been destroyed. He meets Edward and gives him the woomera. Esther is a married woman; she has named her son after William, but it seems the actual father is Edward. Though heartbroken, William accepts these events as part of "the Dance". Bidding Esther goodbye, he leaves to ritually walk the landscapes of Cheshire as he once walked Australia. His walk ends in the church. Taking off his clothes and painting his body with clay, he dances a spirit dance. Reception The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in The Guardian, notes that Strandloper has been described as Garner's "first ever adult book". 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". She criticizes the "Aboriginal episodes" as "the usual anthropological nonsense, dotted with that giveaway primitive-peoples linguistic marker, the biblical cadence." In short, she finds the work "disappointingly precious" and "a bit embarrassing to read", even if "patches of the writing are lovely". The author and folklorist Neil Philip, writing in Signal, states that Garner "clearly regards" the real-life William Buckley as his "spiritual ancestor". He notes that Aboriginal churinga are totemic artefacts that "record sacred details of the eternal Dreamtime", in a form that only initiates can understand. 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. He summarizes the book's theme as that "Aboriginal spirituality offers a balance of individual and community, and man and landscape, of a kind that we [Westerners] need". The novelist Brian Attebery, writing in The New York Review of Science Fiction, admires Garner's handling of the story. 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