Seventy-Two Virgins received mixed reviews on original release.
David Smith, writing for
The Observer, said "despite the pacy narration, there is a sense of going nowhere fast", but praised the humour, saying "Yet while Johnson is a heroic failure as a novelist, he scores in his comic handling of those most sensitive issues: the ideological motives of
Muslim suicide bombers (whence the title) and the mixed blessings of the American empire. The playing of these as pantomime risks causing offence, but, as in person, Johnson succeeds in being charming and sincere."
The Spectator (which Johnson was editing at the time) gave it a positive review,
Douglas Hurd comparing it to
P. G. Wodehouse (the plot device of a character being threatened by potential scandal regarding his involvement in a lingerie business named 'Eulalie' is lifted directly from Wodehouse's
The Code of the Woosters) and praising the "rollicking pace and continuous outpouring of comic invention"; however, he also said that it read like it had been written in three days. Hurd also accurately described Johnson as "the next prime minister but three". In the
Literary Review, Philip Oakes said that the "Thrills [were] muffled by relentless jokiness and inordinate length of book." Attention was refocused on
Seventy-Two Virgins in 2019, with Johnson poised to win the
Conservative Party leadership election and become
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In
The Guardian,
Mark Lawson noted that "it's striking that Barlow's view – that public value should make private conduct irrelevant – is one the writer has continued to embrace through domestic troubles." He noted the
anti-French and
anti-American tone, and pointed out the use of offensive language: "references to 'Islamic headcases' and 'Islamic nutcases'. Arabs are casually noted to have '
hook noses' and '
slanty eyes'; a
mixed-race Briton is called 'coffee-coloured'; and there are mentions of '
pikeys' and people who are '
half-caste'." The novel was also criticised for depicting Jews as "controlling the media" and being able to "fiddle" elections, an evidently antisemitic trope. During the
2019 general election campaign,
Catherine Bennett similarly argued that the novel "amounts to a compelling case for character reappraisal" and that its perceived tendency to evaluate women's worth "according to their fuckability on the – sometimes eccentric – Johnson scale" indicates a lack of "interest in addressing, for instance, sex discrimination, harassment, [or] the gender pay gap". == References ==