SOURCE: King, Francis. “Nostalgia for the Mud.” Spectator (21 March 1992): 34.

In the following review, King offers a positive assessment of Arcadia.

Jim Crace's first novel, Continent—recipient of the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the David Higham Prize, the Chianti-Ruffino/Antico Fattore Prize—was set in an imaginary country. Arcadia, his third novel, is set in an imaginary city, an amalgam, as it were, of Birmingham, Lyons and Milan.

From his eyrie, a private roof garden on the 28th floor of the headquarters of his business empire, 80-year-old Vic gazes down on this city, which, a remote yet sharp-eyed observer, he ‘knows as a hawk knows fields.’ What chiefly interests him is the market-place, full of noise, rubbish, inefficiency and waste, in which he once worked as a humble greengrocer's assistant and from which he started his slow, ruthless ascent to affluence and power. In that...