A murder, and the narrator's peculiar indifference in The Enigma of Arrival

It seems that the first section of V.S. Naipaul's 1988 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, concerns perception and misperception, especially on the part of the narrator, an unnamed character who in every particular seems to be VSN himself. The narrator (like VSM), a writer from Trinidad who has been established in England for 20 years and has recently moved to a small rented cottage in the country, was raised from childhood w/ many perceived ideas about life in England, and at this point in his life he clearly recognizes that the childhood textbook illustrations of the glories of England - country manors, cathedrals, et al - was a sanitized myth. We don't know (yet) exactly why he left London, but he clearly wants to find some beauty, peace, and serenity in the countryside - but he becomes disillusioned, or at least educated, about that pretty quickly - the many intrusions of the modern world on the sites of ancient pagan rituals and burials, the newcomers to the country village, displacing the traditional, old farmers who have been shoved aside by modern farming methods, the pretty cottages either left to ruin or rented out to newcomers who won't tend the garden, drive too fast for the small lanes, and generally have an air of hostility or indifference, unlike the friendly country folk he'd imagined (of course the narrator himself is a "newcomer," and probably not an overly friendly sort himself, in his search for solitude). The first section of the novel, Jack's Garden, takes a strange twist when there's suddenly a dramatic story: A new couple in the neighborhood squabble, the wife leaves the husband to run off to Italy (such a cliche, the narrator opines) with the local repairman, returns home (he kicked her out, it's said), teases her feckless husband and taunts him w/ her infidelity, and he murders her. There's amazingly little discussion of this crime - the narrator gives us no idea what happened to the husband, there's no sense of fear or horror or outrage, no inquiring reporters, no arrest and trial, nothing - it's treated like a bit of gossip, except that the narrator helps the victim's sister gather her sister's few belongings. Is the narrator shocked that a crime of violence and of passion could occur in this rural setting? Or is he indifferent - in particular because he's indifferent to his neighbors; there's something snobbish in this whole section, as if the narrator imagines himself to be better than his neighbors, more cultured and worthy of the landscape, attentive, in ways in which others are not, to the beauty surrounding him and its demise. He gives us little insight into the minds of any of the other characters - because he has no such insight. He doesn't really care about anyone else. We'll see what kind of character unfolds as the novel progresses - there is surely something painful in his past that led to his retreat and isolation.