Malreddy has objected to these features of the narrative. He sees The Warlord's Son as marked throughout by "aggressive," "frenzied," and "knee-jerk Orientalism" that simply recycles stereotypes in the interests of lurid sensationalism. Fesperman does employ and trade on certain exoticist clichés, especially early on, but his use of them is mitigated by being part of what is actually an insistent questioning of the reliability of his protagonist as focalizer. Malreddy is too quick to conflate character and author and ignores the deliberate distance used to point up Skelly's responses as limited and partial. Indeed, the story comes increasingly to be about the gradual development of Skelly's perspective from Orientalism to a kind of relativism.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and debates about whether employing stereotypes necessarily reproduces them — here they intentionally mark character blindness.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 345