Major themes in V.S Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival

V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) narrows its focus in part 3 (Ivy) to a set of three characters/couples living on the manor/property in Wiltshire where VSN/the narrator (pretty much one and the same at this point; for simplicity, I will identify this character as VSN) rents a cottage for about 10 years: Pitton, the gardener, not especially effective as such, tending a property that in the height of the manor's glory required a team of 16; now Pitton, working alone, does primarily clean-up chores and occasional odd jobs as requested (ordered) by the "landlord," the last vestige of what was once a prosperous clan; the Phillipses, a someone elderly married couple who more or less manage the estate, apparently somewhat friendly with Pitton (they have tea together every day, although this seems more like an obligation than a friendly ritual; the P's gossip to VSN about Pitton and his pretensions); and a 3rd whose name eludes me at the moment, but he's basically a one-man chauffeur service, driving the landlord and others (including VSN) on errands and on various airport and train-station shuttles. Each of this triad is scarping by during the obvious decline of the estate; none has a secure future in any sense - the Phillipses have never had a permanent home and they have the Micawber-like idea that they'll eventually lose this job but that "something will come up"; the driver extremely proud of his son in the Army, assigned to an artillery unit nearby, thus a participant in the artillery training and various military operations that VSN believes are part of the degradation of the countryside; and Pitton, who near the end of the Ivy section of the novel gets sacked, evidently at the orders of the estate agent, always on the lookout for economies that will enable the manor to produce more income (for the benefit of the landlord, who's virtually never seen). Pitton reacts w/ great bitterness, as is to be expected; each of these characters depends for the sense of self-worth on the maintenance of a close relation and confidence w/ the landlord - whom we see is indifferent to those around him - except for his continued odd reach-outs to VSN himself, sending him poems and evidently decent sketches, obviously aware of VSN's literary status, though VSN offers virtually nothing to establish a friendship w/ the one he calls only "my landlord." Is the landlord symbolic of an attenuated God, elusive and mysterious and just out of reach? Readers must wonder why we should care so much about the fate of these elderly employees of a once-grand estate; of course, the novel is not exactly a Marxist tract, but VSN does show us a miniature version of a class struggle, with the aristocrat living off the labor of other and accumulated wealth for which he has done nothing - and of course the need for better social services and entitlements. But on another level it's a mournful look at life gone by, and a novel about missed connections and missed perceptions, assumptions about the pastoral life that prove at every turn to be wrong.