SOURCE: Dyer, Geoff. “Word Salad.” New Statesman & Society (20 March 1992): 45.

In the following review of Arcadia, Dyer cites shortcomings in the novel's linguistic excesses and corresponding lack of character development.

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...