‘Craceland’: An introduction

Jim Crace is one of the most critically acclaimed British novelists writing today. Although he is sometimes thought of as a ‘cult’ figure, his oeuvre has an international reputation. Through an intense and visionary focus on specific times and contexts, the recurring themes of his novels are technologically induced change, the consequences of social reorganisation, new forms of governance, and the evolution of faith. In his fictions, the force of these concerns is made manifest through characters who play out on the page what Crace calls ‘the verities of the human condition’ (Crace in Smiley 1989) in a series of increasingly complicated engagements with their society.