The British Crace maintains his reputation as a bold fabulist with
this third novel (Continent; The Gift of Stones) about urban man
nourished by fictions of his rural past. Victor, the Vegetable
King, began by peddling eggs in the marketplace at age seven; now,
a millionaire octogenarian, he decides to replace the open-air
market with a glass-enclosed extravaganza. That's the gist of what
happens here; Crace passes up conventional storylines (a
rags-to-riches saga, corporate intrigue) to attend to his own
altogether convincing world, recognizably contemporary but
geographically indeterminate - a city rooted in a medieval English
past but dependent on American-style freeways, its two poles Big
Vic (the fortress-like skyscraper where frail, laconic Victor lives
alone) and the Soap Market, where the soapies (fruit and vegetable
traders) form a link between town and country and dispense "the
blessing of the multitude" as lustily as the denizens of Gershwin's
Catfish Row. And where, too, Victor's mother, Em, a new arrival
from the country, once begged for money, Victor a fixture at her
breast, Em transforming her harsh rural past into a "tinseled
paradise," passing on this fantasy to Victor, who will eventually
pass it on to the entire city as Arcadia, his exotic new
marketplace. Crace skips over the 70-odd years between Victor's
debut as a boy-trader and his present eminence, dwelling instead on
the struggle between Victor and his top aide, Rook, fired for
taking kickbacks from the soapies; but the struggle, and Rook's
grisly end, are in turn secondary to the coming of Arcadia - the
novel's climax - and Crace's opportunity for a somewhat trite
attack on shopping malls. Read this for its story, and you'll feel
shortchanged; read it for its rich texture, with influences running
the gamut from Robert Browning to speculative fiction, and you'll
feel amply rewarded. (Kirkus Reviews)
A novel on the theme of city life set in the present day and
looking back over 80 years. Crace's earlier novels have won The
Guardian Fiction Prize, the David Higham Prize, the Whitbread First
Novel and the Chianti Ruffino prize in Italy.
General
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