SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Phantom of the Market.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (4 October 1992): 3, 12.

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

The true characters in the fiction of the British writer Jim Crace are not individuals but communities. In the superb and haunting The Gift of Stones, it was a late Stone Age clan of weapons-makers, uprooted and set to wandering by the advent of Bronze Age technology. In Arcadia, it is the barrow men and stall-holders of a fruit-and-vegetable market dating back to medieval times, who are displaced by the construction of a great glass arcade adorned with foliage and waterfalls, where food is sold in shiny packages.

Crace's writing is marked by a steely control, a sub-zero chilliness and a sense of impending explosion, as if cryonic conditions were necessary to set off some new kind of subatomic conflagration. His is the...