Don't rent a farmhouse in Languedoc, Mrs Mallinson! seems to be the message of Adam Thorpe's new novel. He should know, since he lives in France himself, unless he is deliberately setting up a scarecrow to discourage visitors. Of course, the isolated Mas des Fosses where Nick and Sarah Mallinson, Cambridge historians with three small daughters, settle for a six-month sabbatical, has a notably sinister history, not only of neglect but of wartime atrocity. And right from the beginning when a local builder working to repair a slippery roof falls to his death, the place suggests a health and safety nightmare, chapter after chapter of potential accidents.

There is the swimming-pool just outside in the back yard with its green scum and switched-off alarm system to which nobody can find the code; there are the wild boars from the woods who root up the would-be lawn and have to be kept out with a high-voltage electric fence; there are the crumbling outhouses and cobwebbed cellars, the rocky streams, the unfriendly yokels, the boar-hunters screaming along the track in front of the house in their 4x4s, the arrival of Nick's alienated druggie son by a former marriage and, worst of all, Jean-Luc the psychotic handyman, particularly deft with an axe. As if all this were not enough, the Mallinsons, being conventional left-liberal types (he was once a Marxist and is currently writing something about the oil industry), worry intermittently about the state of the world in general.

So the principal emotion explored in The Standing Pool is anxiety - the sense that something awful is going to happen to somebody just over the page. Sarah, who has been secretly photographed swimming naked in the pool by the handyman, has the idea “that everyone was, in the end, theoretically defenceless against the very worst possibility”, while Nick ruminates that “history had somehow escaped them all; had so far let them off”, but concludes comfortably that “history can never be present...can never clamber over you and prod you in the stomach. It is all words”. Not reassuring for the reader.

But among the clouds of anxiety hanging over these very ordinary people, and the fear that they may, after all, not be let off by history and become victims for others to read about with pity in the newspapers, there are also patches of blue sky, moments of happiness, pleasure, thoughtfulness, novelty (a nightingale singing by day); and the children, at least, clearly enjoy themselves most of the time. Thorpe is a sharp observer of relationships and of the inward streams of consciousness that motivate small shifts of behaviour, and he takes us as often into the obsessive mind of Jean-Luc the handyman as into the minds of the English visitors. If he had not chosen to write a contemporary gothic thriller, keeping his readers always on the edge of their seats, he would surely have been able to dig deeper into this rich layer of our history, the boundary between the brittle modern world his English characters come from and the decaying ancient one they temporarily inhabit.

The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe
Cape £16.99 pp426

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