The fallacy of the pastoral in Enigma of Arrival

May be even the 3rd time I'm reading V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, though have not read it for at least 10 years, and it continues to bring pleasure and surprises. What an unusual novel! The first section, Jack's Garden, is presented as a first-person narrative by an unnamed narrator who in every way seems to be VSN himself: a writer, living and working in England, recently moved to a cottage near Stonehenge/Amesbury, childhood spent in poverty in Trinidad and raised to revere and yearn for the cultured life of England. Readers have to wonder why exactly VSN calls this a novel, and why he didn't just set forth to write a memoir or essay - why does he need this distance between the narrator and himself? Perhaps that will become clear in later sections. In fact, VSN's narrator says little about his personal life; we suspect he is living alone as there is no mention of a wife nor of any other companion - but this may not be s (or maybe that's an element of his personal life that VSN wants to cut loose from this narration); mostly, the novel so far is about his conceptions and misconceptions about life in the English countryside. This novel is an anti-pastoral: It begins w/ some beautiful if conventional accounts of walks in the country near the cottage into which he has recently moved, but soon we see that his preconception of the peaceful and "simple" life in the countryside was all wrong and mixed up, based on sentiment and desire alone. He climbs a hill for a view of Stonehenge and sees fields marked with many targets used for Army artillery practice; he also sees in the distance crowds of tourists - about whom he is snidely contemptuous - stopping to see the mysterious monument. He imagines that in the country he can settle into a simple life among villagers, but over time realizes that his preconceptions - based on his reading (Wordsworth in particular) were all misleading and inaccurate: the villagers are often cruel, to animals and to one another; they do not choose to live in rural isolation but are forced to do so because of housing costs and the requirements of agricultural labor, the yards are mostly left to ruin, the one exception - Jack's Garden - is a tribute to his care and labor and not something that can endure after he dies, Jack's widow has no desire to maintain their life in the countryside and will relocate to a housing development as soon as possible. In other words, the pastoral retreat is an indulgence accessible only to those, such as the narrator and VSN, with their own set of preconceptions and with the means to escape from the pastoral at will.