Into the wilderness books5/11/2023 ![]() Crace is far from the first to expand the original version. Indeed ''Signals of Distress,'' with its central rock, never to be restored to its original place, resembles that novel in containing a huge but collapsible phallic object.Ĭrace is once more in the Golding vein in ''Quarantine,'' a novel-fable that offers an imaginative account of Christ's 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. The writer of the recent past whom Crace most resembles is William Golding, whose novel ''The Spire'' has the same sort of almost fanatical concentration on a particular time and a particular object - the erection and partial collapse of the Salisbury cathedral spire. There are distinguished novels of both kinds. If this is politics, it is very abstract politics.Ĭrace's way is closer to what Iris Murdoch distinguished as ''crystalline'' construction, the end of the fiction spectrum where the novel is most like a poem, most turned in on itself, most closely wrought for the sake of art and internal cohesion - the other pole being the social or even, at the extreme, journalistic, a mode to be preferred if the writer's purpose is to develop studies of characters in a larger modern society, given the degree of freedom to act and decide that such a society allows. It might be argued that the books return to the theme of conflict between old and new social and technological orders, as when the workers in stone encounter horsemen with bronze weapons, or when the ancient market and its trading traditions are demolished by the edict of the man in the skyscraper, so that a life close to nature must give way to the unnatural demands of steel and concrete and business. In these times, when many profess to believe there can be little interest in art that has no obvious political bearing, it may seem remarkable that Crace's chosen topics are so devoid of direct political reference. What they share is this imaginative power, these variously obsessed landscapes and cultures. This intense focusing on, or inhabitation of, a particular milieu means that there is little obvious thematic continuity from one book to the next. ![]() Then, in ''Signals of Distress,'' we meet him as an expert on matters nautical and on life in an early Victorian seaport. The description of a great produce market in ''Arcadia'' is a fine example you would think the author had spent his life studying fruit and vegetables. Each of his disparate worlds is rendered with unshakable assurance and in impressive detail. Obviously, Crace has no attachment to a single locale or theme one has never had the slightest idea of what he was likely to do next. The world of ''Signals of Distress'' is a remote fishing village on the west coast of England where, in 1836, a ship runs aground and, among other strange events, a herd of cows is rescued and a black slave escapes. ''Arcadia,'' his first book of any length, imagines a city and the usurpation of its ancient market by a self-made capitalist who began his life in it. His second, ''The Gift of Stones,'' is a brief, intense story of the prehistorical moment when stone yielded to bronze. His first, ''Continent,'' which was published in 1986, is really less a novel than a collection of seven stories, all set in an imagined world of which the author has mastered the geography, the botany and the anthropology.
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