Arcadia is the story of a city or, more precisely, the story of the market at the heart of the city, its produce and traders. The market is controlled by Victor who began life as a waif, surviving on kindness, guile and stall-holders' unwanted waste. Now a lonely 80-year-old millionaire, he rarely leaves the air-conditioned sanctuary of Big Vic, the office block where he plans to transform the teeming bustle of the market into the ambient efficiency of a vast arcade-cum-mall. If Victor's first years, as Jim Crace's garrulous narrator claims, “stand for all our city's woes,” then the woes latent in the scheme of his last years are represented by the traders whose lives will be swept away, like unwanted waste, by his plans.

Such a summary prepares you for a novel far less strange than the one actually encountered in these mossy pages. The style surprises from the start: a sort of cockney baroque, moving to within a beat or two of a constantly thwarted iambic tattoo; coming, at times, to the very brink of rhyme: “the garden was no place for him. He couldn't wait to reach Big Vic and his nebuliser's balsamed mist.” Rhetorical, shot through with archaisms (diadem, necrotic) and gobbets of jaunty suss (“men have shallow, porous bladders which nag and leak. A shaking train is torture when they want to piss”), Arcadia reads as if translated from some earthy register of yore into a mordant modernism. “Two fighting men … So far as one could tell from the stream of threats and imprecations they exchanged, their differences would not be solved without the death of one.”

Like the market itself, Crace's prose is “steeped in root, and leaf, and fruit.” The modern urban world and its inhabitants are rendered vegetative by the vocabulary of the market garden. People become a species of fruit and veg: two lovers lie “curve-wrapped on their mattress like two bananas on one bunch.” After a riot where the traders hurl not bottles but cabbages, tomatoes and peaches, one of which hits a TV cameraman—“his blood was peach juice, and his juice was blood”—a body lies “discarded like a bruised courgette … stripped naked to the waist, softened, bruised and split like an old banana by the beating he received.”

Arcadia, Crace's city of words, sprouts, photosynthesises, ripens, rots. But to what end? Our narrator notes that it was “a strange and—finally—tiresome game to bend words in a way that was confusing and not funny.” Our sense of the lives and dreams of the characters who inhabit this imaginative world is in no way enhanced by Crace's insistent vegetablisation. The human cost of the enterprise becomes apparent when we see that Crace's intentions are strangely similar to those of the architect (depicted with some derision) who wins the contract to transform the market.

“Let's give the people a country walk right at the city's heart,” he says. To “bring the outdoors indoors” he constructs “hills and plains and ridges made from curving sheets of glass.” Crace does it with words. The great flaw of the architect's design is that it suffocates the natural life of the people it claims to shelter. The author's rhetorical greengrocery does something similar, turning them into cabbages, composed of successive layers of metaphor. Rather than being nourished by the tangle of verbal overgrowth, the people whose lives he seeks to celebrate serve primarily to fertilise it.