Arcadia.

ARCADIA

Jim Crace

Atheneum, $20, 311 pp.

Jim Crace is of the same generation of British novelists as Martin Amis and Peter Ackroyd; and like them he is a chronicler of the city. Resemblances end quickly after that: where Amis (London Fields) is apocalyptic in theme and "postmodern" in form, Crace is generally affirmative and traditional. Unlike Ackroyd whose English Music seeks to tie London to the eternal English Imagination, Crace offers us a very earthy city, whose assurances are those of survival, of growth from decay. This is a carefully crafted book, one that seems as symmetrical and patterned as a globe artichoke. The prose runs continually to unmarked blank verse, so rhythmic and alive is it to incantation: "This is the sorcery of cities. We do not chase down country roads for fame or wealth or liberty. Or romance even. If we hanker for the fires and fevers of the world, we turn our backs on herds and hedgerows and seek out crowds."

The story's focus is on the end times of Victor, the vegetable king, and his attempt to leave some sort of lasting monument to his life as a wholesale produce baron. Victor's position is anomalous: he has grown great through produce, through feeding the country to the city, yet he lives in a "misanthropic building," occupying a greenhouse roof garden, plagued by aphids. This same garden was once a restaurant but now abandoned because the building's sway sickened the patrons. The occasion of his eightieth birthday has Victor ruminating on a project, a high-rise structure to be called Arcadia which will replace the open-air Soap Market. Victor wishes to transform, to idealize his roots, for it was in the Soap Market that Victor got his start as a hawker so many years before. His architect promises Victor "Outside, the city; countryside within." That same birthday, however, also sees the unexpected and bitter split with Rook, Victor's chief of staff. The action of the novel is to a large extent the tracing of Rook's schemes to be the bird of ill omen for Arcadia. The auguries he performs convey the futility of the Arcadian scheme.

At the same time, Crace asks us to be burghers and to revel in the city, mostly the smell of its bowels. The organic metaphor won't be suppressed: "our city" is alive and the hero of the novel. The antagonist is the country and the conflict one of ingestion and growth; the place at which city mouth meets country morsel is the Soap Market where produce is sold. To city and country must be added a third, the urban developer, whose architects and planners would make artificial the city's relationship with the country. The major action moves through metaphor to myth: what is vital grows and will return. Waiting also, darkly, in this novel is a shadow. The epigraph warns us that the greatest men, like the tallest buildings, make their marks by blocking out the sun. Such threat to life provokes a recollection of "Et in Arcadia Ego," words which Crace never lets Death speak outright. In the most fundamental way, this novel places at its center the struggle between life and death.

Crace's imaginative energy--at least as far as characterization is concerned--is not in the present but in the past with Victor's mother, Em, and her struggles to survive with infant Vic. Em's history, told in flashback, is Georgian and the urban world Crace constructs is brilliantly alive, almost Dickensian in its grotesques, its sharpers, and in the symbolic use of the conflagration which ends Em's life. The contemporary thugs, street people, professionals, and managers seem to act more as necessary adjuncts to the theme--the city's survival as organism. This leads to the technical wrinkle in the novel which is puzzling. The narrator announces himself as The Burgher, a onetime newspaper columnist who published under that by-line. But he also has impossible omniscience; his access to the histories and minds of the characters is never explained, just winked at with a phrase: "I raise my head above the parapet again." The Burgher is, however, necessary for the book's structure: The City needs a City-Dweller to offer closure. In his final monologue the retired Burgher says "yes" to life where life seems most threatened--in the slums of the city he loves. His is a rhapsody on a fruit, a pear about to spoil. The Burgher eats in celebration of the market which has sprung again from detritus, from the refuse of the sanitized Arcadia.

Crace catches so the rhythms of growth, of organic life, in the city that a reader can forget the technical problem and scent the wind: "My tongue's kept busy by the scrap of pear skin lodged between my teeth. That's all that stops me sucking in our city air, and whistling."

And this almost scans. There is menace conveyed in the description of the riot and fire which destroy the old Soap Market, much chest-tightening pain over Rook's asthmatic defeat, but the real power of the novel lies in the poetic language and not with an individualized human drama. The narration gets increasingly distant as the climactic scenes unfold: we flit about, watch, overhear, and get mashed in words: "He tossed [the grape] in his mouth. It popped between his teeth. He poked his tongue out at the children. Squashed green flesh lay in the ladle of his tongue."

Jim Crace has found a form which celebrates the cycle of life in the city. His achievement is pungent but almost too self-regarding, too easily satisfied with the smell of mortality. As he escapes from the shadow cast by the towering Arcadia and faces the shadow of his own death, The Burgher's affirmations transform the city's tragedies, gobble them up in a rush to rebirth. But this won't do. Arcadia simply lets us off too easily. Death, which is always "also in Arcadia," has its roots in evil, which, God knows, is real enough in all our cities today. The story of another fruit eaten in celebration of the self slips outside the coils of this narrative. But that metaphysical premise must be excluded if The Burgher is to have omniscience, for he speaks the myth by which the novelist as his own god redeems the world. The technical problem, finally, comes around to a thematic statement: we can rub shoulders with Death in Arcadia when we speak beyond our own limitations. In this City of Man the source of such speaking is left unfound.

EDWARD T. WHEELER is chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.