A far cry from Paradise

This strange novel is described as a ghost story, although it reads like a nervous breakdown in which both writer and reader are embedded. So constricted is the narrative that the central figure, Jim Smith, delivers no opinion of his own, although his past life appears to have been full of incident: extensive travel, a business career, apparently successful, in London, a certain level of worldly experience which has vanished, leaving him without attachments or points of reference. He has, for no apparent reason, bought a house, Paradise Farm, in an unspecified part of the country, and proposes to live there without company, devoting himself to farming his land and tending his animals, his only help that of an almost silent handyman and a cleaner, both of them taciturn and incurious, when not actively hostile.