The Phantom of the Market : ARCADIA, <i> By Jim Crace (Atheneum: $20; 311 pp.)</i>

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 antiseptic order of an operating room where radical heart surgery is being performed.

He strips away particular references. He uses ages, not dates. “Stones” took place at any time during the fourth or fifth millennium before Christ; it took place on some nameless seacoast. “Arcadia” exists in a recognizable but unidentified near future. It is set in no particular country, though its climate seems to be subarctic and subtropical at the same time.

These are attributes. They characterize Crace’s power, but the power itself is of a more conventional kind: a burst of heroism or despair, an unexpected human wonder, the sadness that wonder does not endure. They burn in the fate of the group, not the protagonist. By analogy, we may sense more of character and a particular quality of soul in an Italian hill town than in the faces and bearing of its individual inhabitants.

The crippled bard in “Stones,” who told the story of his clan and invented a story for its future, was beautifully drawn, but what he conveyed was not so much himself as his communal history. In “Arcadia,” the nonagenarian billionaire, Victor, who buries the green-market in glass and steel, and Rook, the former barrow boy who is his factotum and antagonist, are abstract figures in a social parable.

The son of a market beggarwoman, Victor started as a barrow boy himself, flourished, took over the whole market, bought into shipping lines, real estate and foreign holdings. The story begins as he is about to celebrate his 90th birthday at the top of the sealed skyscraper that he rarely leaves. Sometimes he visits his greenhouse on the roof; it provides him a breath of fresh air and a reminder of the countryside his mother came from.

The celebration will feature a rustic lunch, a few cats to suggest a farmyard--chickens were thought of, but ruled out for health reasons--a wreath of laurel for Victor’s chair. The air conditioning is turned up to simulate a country breeze. The five oldest market men are invited--Victor’s one-time colleagues.

Steamed fish is served. “As he had scaled and silvered with old age,” Crace writes, “so his taste for fish had grown.” There will be no speeches. “What old men want is peace and informality and the chance to talk among themselves like smutty boys.”

The arrangements are made by Rook, lean, mercurial and a traitor. Years before, as a market stall-holder, he had led a strike against Victor’s rents; he then sold out in exchange for a job as the old man’s personal assistant. He goes on being a traitor and it makes him rich; supervising the market for Victor, he extorts kickbacks from his onetime friends.

At the party, one of them denounces him. Rook is fired, and takes poisonous refuge among the roots he has poisoned. He haunts the market; learning of Victor’s plans to raze it, he manages to incite another protest, but it fizzles. He arranges to set the market on fire; in the subsequent riot he is beaten to death by the police. Years later, after the gleaming and hermetic new market is in place, a few shabby barrows of damaged fruit make their appearance in a back alley. Razed or poisoned, roots come back, Crace suggests, and undermine whatever is built over them.

If “Arcadia,” despite a compelling tone and vision, lacks the strength of “Stones,” it is because its communal story is less moving and more constricted. The passing of a millennial age whose faces, names and ways are lost in pre-history has a grander mystery to it than the withering of a postmodern city’s earthy roots. The modern story feels claustrophobic in its allegorical abstractness; it needs human specifics.

Rook, perhaps because he has denied himself so many times, is an elliptic figure, often to the point of invisibility. His affair with Anna, Victor’s secretary, is faintly sketched, and so is she. The bloodless, spider-like Victor is more compelling, as indeed, he must be, since he is the parable’s controlling figure.

His drive to amass power has leached out all but a ghost of human substance, but the ghost makes itself heard. The most striking section of the book--apart from the hellish market fire that Crace actually manages to make burn cold --is the account of who Victor was, and where his arid, self-consuming passion came from.

His mother, suddenly widowed, brought him in from the country as a nurseling. All she could do was beg, and her baby helped. Crace is darkly acute as he writes that a successful beggar needs to present a reassuring image. A male beggar can be jaunty or a clown; a woman must offer some equivalent reassurance. Naked suffering is too scary and people avoid it. As a howling baby, Victor would disconcert; a peacefully nursing Victor encourages the proffered coin. So until he is 5, hungry or not, he is kept firmly squashed to his mother’s breast. It is, as an aunt remarks, his lathe; he must put in his eight hours at it; he is the bread-winner.

From there on, of course, it is cold greed for 90 years. The natural world of farms, markets and human impulse all but finished Victor and his mother; he dedicates the rest of his life to finishing it off in his turn. Only the grubby barrows at the end betray him; those and a pawky statue, embarrassing to the architects, which he places at the entrance to the gleaming arcade. It shows a beggar nursing her child.

The elusive image of Victor and his desolating need snaps into focus. Those odd bits of childishness we had noted here and there find their place, even as we read of his uncompromising schemes. He is the blind mouth at the nipple.