During a storm in November 1836 an American barque, the Belle of Wilmington, is driven on to a sandbank near Wherrytown, in the west of England. The Canadian cattle which are its cargo—to be replaced, on the return voyage, by emigrants to Canada—swim to the shore. Later, the crew are rescued by fishermen; they take up residence in Wherrytown's one inn, while their vessel is salvaged and repaired. Another resident of the inn is Aymer Smith, who has just arrived on a steam-packet, the Ha'porth of Tar. A man of high moral principles (which he demonstrates by setting free the Belle's black slave, Otto), he is “a Sceptic, a Radical and an active Amender,” and is particularly zealous in educating his inferiors. He has come to the town in order to inform the local kelp-gatherers personally that, due to recent developments in the chemical industry, their services in providing raw material for his family firm of soap-manufacturers will no longer be required.

At first sight, Signals of Distress seems very different from Crace's earlier novels. It is set in a definite place, at a definite time, and begins, indeed, as a historical novel might. But, as the work progresses, this impression changes. There are no references, such as the historical novel delights in, to contemporary events or personages. The author treats detail—especially nautical detail—with an insouciance worthy of Ouida. A suspicion that everything is not quite kosher aboard the Belle begins when Captain Comstock orders “a double-barrelled cannon” to be fired as a signal of distress, increases when “fore and mizzen topmasts … fell away into the sea,” as if a ship's masts had no more secure tenure on the hull than a hat on the head, and reaches certainty with a parodic description of the repairs (which might have come from The Hunting of the Snark), when every hand is on deck “tarring timbers, knotting canvas, dislodging barnacles.” Wherrytown itself, first given verisimilitude as the Belle's first port of call before Fowey and Cork, gradually floats off into symbolic abstraction, so that one is more and more inclined to read its name as Wheretown. And the discovery that that little-known philosopher, Emile dell'Ova, who provided the epigraph for Crace's previous novel, Arcadia, also supplies Aymer with reading-matter in the shape of his Truismes (Paris, 1774), brings the novel into line with its predecessors. Crace's prose, too, marches to the same rhythm as earlier: the insistent, often infuriating, background iambic beat of blank verse, occasionally reinforced by a half-rhyme, or an echo of one. While this gave a bardic lilt to The Gift of Stones, it worked less well in Arcadia, and in Signals of Distress, it gives the impression that the inhabitants of Wherrytown are out-of-work Shakespearean actors:

“I'll let the dogs inside to get you up. We've three dogs now. Our two have found a bitch to chase around.”

“Whose bitch is that?”

“She's ours, to keep or sell. She's sleeping in our hut, and that's the law. Or ought to be. Miggy! I'm warning you. It won't be dogs'll get you up, but me.”

Unlike the earlier novels, however, there is much in Signals of Distress that is comic, even farcical. Aymer's peregrinations along the seashore with a young sailor or a newly married couple, during which he discourses at interminable length on natural history, and is met with incomprehension, boredom and even anger, are richly humorous, as are his cut-and-thrust philosophical bouts—in which he is invariably worsted—with George, the servant at the inn. While Aymer, a relation of Mrs Jellyby, displays his abstract philanthropy by allowing the black slave to escape into a winter's night without food or warm clothing, it is George who keeps him hidden and fed when the locals, who have never seen a black man and believe him to be an ogre, would hunt him down and kill him.

Crace has set previous novels at transitional points of society: the change from the Stone to the Bronze Age, from rural to urban life. In Signals of Distress, the Wendepunkt is the replacement of one technology by another: the Belle of Wilmington by the Ha'porth of Tar, feminine sail by masculine steam; soda ash from burnt kelp by sodium carbonate extracted from common salt by the Leblanc process. Aymer defines his “Amendism” as “the scientific view that every offence … should be settled only by reparations of an equal force”: the drunken American sailors should make amends, when sober, by “imbibing some unpleasing liquid, or buying but not drinking beers of equal value to those that have intoxicated them.” Like his philanthropy, this is impractical comic rubbish, but, like it, a distortion of a natural law: action and reaction, deed and consequence, or, as George iambically puts it, “You stick your bum in fire and you must sit on blisters”—a fact Aymer has to acknowledge when he is beaten up by two bruisers for setting Otto free.

The symbol of natural equilibrium is the Cradle Rock on the cliffs outside Wherrytown; delicately poised, it sways in the wind, until the American sailors, drunk on the captain's brandy, push it from its pedestal to rock no more. The old order is over; the Belle, on its return voyage, goes down in the Cabot Strait; crew and emigrants are drowned; Aymer's vision of a king of a pantisocratic idyll in the Americas, peopled by the two couples he had befriended, will never be realized.

Signals of Distress is an intriguing work; more approachable, being less schematic, than Crace's three earlier books: balancing, like the Cradle Rock itself, between the realistic and the experimental novel.