[In the following review, Mars-Jones offers a positive assessment of Arcadia.]

Joseph, the youngest of the three main characters in Jim Crace's fascinating new novel [Arcadia], a country boy newly arrived in the metropolis, sees in his new surroundings the opposite of a logic of place:

Some fool, in fact, had built this city on the worst of sites. Where was the fish-stocked estuary, the river bridge, the sheltered harbour, the pass between two hills, the natural crossroads in the land where ancient settlements were meant to be? Where was the seam of coal to make the city rich? Where were the hummocks and escarpments to make the city safe? Where was the panoramic view to make the city spiritual, a holy place? What made this thirsty, ill-positioned city—too southerly to benefit from hops, too northerly for grapes—so rich and large? The answer crowded him at every step. It caught his shins. It bustled him from side to side. The market place! A city with no natural virtues is reduced to trade. …

Typical of the book is this passage's register—the fullness of expression, irrespective of its source (country boy, no education), the stream of rhetorical questions, the nagging presence of blank-verse rhythms. Much less typical, in fact virtually unique in a book so much given over to sophisticated urban recastings of natural imagery, is the criticism of the essence of cities, their bossy dependence on what lies outside them.

The city of the book offers a grudging untrustworthy hospitality. We learn, in flashback, that Victor, now the octogenarian patriarch of the fruit market, arrived there as a babe in arms, and was immediately put to work at his mother's breast. She begged, and soon learned that a woman breastfeeding offers passers-by a matchless icon of chaste sensuality, an image of repletion that paradoxically compels charity.

In later life, Victor inhabits a purpose-built office block overlooking the market, and on his eightieth birthday resolves to re-imagine and rebuild the commercial centre below. The main story of the novel, then, is of a man made by the marketplace (where by definition the country comes to town) who makes the marketplace anew: the design project that wins his approval, a hi-tech enclosure that mimics tropical conditions, is called Arcadia.

What is pleasure and substance in Arcadia, though, is the way Jim Crace's prose obsessively, page by page, tackles the same task as Victor's, of reconstituting pastoral imagery in a new context. There is a plot, and human interaction (Victor fires his right-hand man, Rook, who plots against Arcadia and hires down-and-out Joseph to sabotage it), but it is not in those departments that the novel is so rewarding. Arcadia is the most intense dream of a city since Edmund White's Caracole, as luxuriant in style but perhaps more decorous—pollarded, you might say—when it comes to character and incident.

Crace's narrative takes on the burden and the joy of expressing what the characters feel. The narrator, lightly characterized, is nominally a gossip columnist, but lyricism is hardly a professional necessity in that sphere, and Crace has lyricism to burn. When a middle-aged couple, the morning after becoming lovers, walk through the street, the prose doesn't so much describe their emotions as become flooded with them, made generous and celebrant: “The hastening single people in the street, tooth-paste and coffee on their gums, a day of labour summoning, a desk, a loom, a till, gave way to them, as if a couple so engrossed and casual had passage rights, like yachts, to an unhindered channel at the pavement's crown. We all defer to couples, do we not? A man and woman hand-in-hand can make the toughest of us step aside, can stop a tram.”

The strangest aspect of Arcadia is undoubtedly its reliance on verse rhythms. Not since Moby-Dick has blank verse thrummed so relentlessly beneath the surface of prose. In passage after passage, Crace's style is as iambic as a migraine. The effect is thrilling in short bursts, in quantity maddening.

Prose and verse are nothing so simple as opposites, but it's as if Crace tries to reconcile them without acknowledging the fact of their estrangement. The same drive, on a larger aesthetic scale, gives Arcadia its distinction and its force, but also a strangeness perhaps beyond what is intended. The novel describes a harsh utopia, neither quite a fable nor a parallel world, an imaginary city that disavows the problems of real ones but has its own glint of unwelcome.

The city in the book is not explicitly the capital of a country, but it defers to no larger entity. The produce that floods into the city comes not from abroad but from an undamaged and undepleted countryside. There is plastic, but barely a trace of the industry which must have made it. There is blight and there are suburbs, but Victor from his skyscraper can see the end of the town and comprehend its layout at a glance—which makes it, by modern standards, a small city. There is no sense in the book of the deconstructive drive of progress, of the way that technology, having made a city possible, denatures the countryside to supply it and then, becoming less bound to place, unravels the city itself. Victor's empire is connected up by fibre-optics, but he still deals essentially in fruit, and the book contains no criticism of urbanism more informed or trenchant than Joseph's.

If Victor is almost a fetishist in his attachment to vegetables and to fruit, so too is his author. When he isn't describing greengrocery—and the book is full of hymns to produce—then he is comparing other things to it. A woman's hair is “lifeless as the leaf tuft of a pulled beetroot.” People laugh themselves “as wet as cress.” An injury is “a fleshy pit like those left by the beaks of jays in pears.” Often what is being savoured is properly the fruit of language, in technical terms like blet or strig or reasty. Sometimes the conceits are laboriously cultivated, as when two people are described as “too sleepy” for public love, and then the adjective is glossed: “‘Sleepy’ is the word growers use to specify a pear, and other soft-fleshed fruits, which have matured but, though they have their colour and their shape, will soon begin to brown and rot and lose their flavour and their bloom.”

Crace resists the suggestion, even when his material invites it, that his cornucopia might be more like a glut of alienation. Victor, after all, received from his mother's breast a nourishing substance that was already a symbolic commodity being dispensed for cash. The city, conversely, should in theory be a generator and sustainer of culture, but is barren. The only art we come across is folk art, the only wisdom folk wisdom, in the form of quaint country rhymes.

On Victor's birthday, he wants a recreated country festival. Fish are brought, live, to town and cooked. A breeze is synthesized. Cats are recruited to loll and play in an air-conditioned suite. But the air is polluted and heavy, and the celebration an ordeal. The three accordionists' instruments are “strapped on their chests like oxygen machines.” Then Victor, choking, suggests an adjournment to the roof, where he has created a garden and a greenhouse, and this artificial island of nature works its magic on the guests and the occasion. Even the musicians are revived, and the oxygen-machine image applied to the accordionists recurs in a naturalized transformation: “It is the only instrument strapped to the player's heart. Its pleated bellows stretch and smile.” From oxygen machine to heart, from estranged culture back rapidly to nature. It's a classic Arcadia moment, dazzling, evasive, a characteristic episode in a novel that poses as a meditation on cities but is actually a perverse idiosyncratic reconstitution, in a prose supersaturated with metre, of the pastoral.