[In the following review, Olshan offers a positive assessment of Arcadia.]

Joining the literature of Utopia is this new entry from novelist Jim Crace, author of The Gift of Stones. Arcadia is a book that conjures up a marketplace so perfect that it dares to offer the experience of shopping as spiritual alternative:

Four spectacular glass ovals which seemed both like cakes and the domes of viscous mosques. … Nine tapering barrel-vaulted aisles—space-framed in wood and steel, space-glazed—radiated from the center without geometric logic but in the pleasing, balanced way that surface roots spread out from trees.

This description of a climate-controlled environment is the proposed architectural renovation for The Soap Market, a venerated fruit-and-vegetable bazaar that lies at the heart of Crace's offbeat yet masterly novel.

Located in an unnamed English city that rises monolithically out of a largely agrarian landscape, the market is owned by a despotic octogenarian named Victor, who, we are told, “lived on his mother's milk till he was six, and then he thrived on charity and trade.”

Victor's father dies before his birth and his mother, cast into poverty, ends up begging for a living in the very Soap Market that will one day belong to her son. Until the death of his mother in a rooming house fire, Victor passes his first six years living under an umbrella and nursing at his mother's breast long after it ceases lactating.

He is forced to endure this grotesque psychological tyranny for the sole reason that the sight of suckling child is the most effective means to inspire charitable contributions. And indeed, once Victor and his mother meet up with his mother's indigent sister, his malnourished mouth is traded off between the two women:

Why should they not take care to put him to good use, and love him still, and love him all the more? They liked the independence that he gave. They did not know—he did not know—that they had robbed him of his liberty, that their rib cages were for him two sets of prison bars, their arms his warders, their breasts his sedatives.

Crace's beautifully written account of Victor's erratic childhood is the most magical and compelling section of the novel. As we witness Victor's dire childhood circumstances, we are able to understand why he distrusts people and has spent his life at a great distance from them.

He dissipates his best years in a high-rise apartment building nicknamed “Old Vic,” from where he runs his grocery empire. Never once has Victor been touched by romantic love; the only love he seems to cultivate is for the plants in his greenhouse. Yet his presence looms like his high-rise over Crace's entire novel: “The tallest buildings throw the longest shadows, it is said, by those who spend their lives in contemplation of their monuments, and those for whom the shadow life is better than the real.”

Despite the distance he maintains, Victor seems to be constantly on the minds of his employees, from whom he exacts an unbreachable loyalty. He is a man attempting to control the “climate” of his adult life in attempt to compensate for his early years of material uncertainty and physical privation. And any hint of tampering with Victor's drive to control by his support staff is met with immediate severance and expulsion.

That is what happens to Victor's right-hand man, the devoted Rook. Taking great pains to arrange Victor's 80th birthday party, Rook scours the Soap Market for the best in vegetables and sweets, arranges for live perch to be transported from Victor's country pond and ferried to Old Vic by taxi from the train station, and invites guests, largely Soap Market merchants, into the home of his friendless millionaire employer.

But much to Rook's chagrin, some of the guests mention to Victor that his preeminent employee had been collecting kickbacks from the other merchants. Without even giving Rook a chance to answer the allegations, the paranoid Victor sacks him; the decision is passed along by Anna, another high-level employee with whom Rook happens to be having an affair. Mortified, infuriated, Rook is thrown out into the street and spends the rest of the novel hanging around and stewing for revenge.

Arcadia is perfectly realized in every facet of its weird introspection. Its characters and its unnamed though vividly evoked city are curiously archetypal. One feels that the book could be set in any urban metropolis and in any time frame within 100 years and never seem outdated or diminished by historical hindsight. The author eschews outright social commentary or any discussion of politics. Although the immediate environment of the novel is graphically well-defined, beyond its borders the reader senses a sociological and geographical blur as profound and mysterious as a forest. Ultimately, the novel itself is Arcadian in concept.

Yet it is the approved vision of a refurbished marketplace, called “Arcadia” by the architects—the glass and chrome facsimile of a halcyon country setting—that ends up threatening to subvert Victor's efforts to maintain his corporate status quo. On the eve of the renovation's commencement, Rook bribes a vagrant to set fire to the merchant stalls. Victor, from the 27th floor of his building, witnesses the fire and, almost against his will, is forced to remember the blaze in which his mother perished:

There was an old straw hat. The smell of bread and urine. The disconcerted snufflings of sleepers on bare boards. The sirens were his mother's screams, the screams of Princesses on fire, of people separated from their homes, the scream of rain-soaked timbers made dry and hot too swiftly by the fire.

The second fire cracks the wall of Victor's self-defenses, and as he tours the damaged Soap Market we grow aware of an emerging tenderness and compassion. One comes to realize that although Arcadia has, for the most part, crystallized outside of Victor's point of view, its overall vision actually resembles his own blinkered view of the world. Victor's spiritual opening suggests that in the end, human life, though divergent in its circumstances, is brought to a par by a common recognition of human suffering.