Phaedimus

The Heights of Euphorum Phaedimus

When Jack - the wrong side of forty, cynical and despondent - meets Julie, not yet twenty-one and dropped out of college, by chance in a poor, remote Indonesian town it is immediately clear they are as different as light and day, yet they are drawn together. It transpires Jack is well entrenched in the town, and deeply involved in various illicit rackets. Julie is scathing about his activities but, lacking her own financial independence, she is manipulated towards complicity. Consequently, their relationship flips between fierce passion and growing enmity. Traumatised when together, yet unable to live apart, their affinity is also impelled by the leader of a politically-based trafficking operation, who in turn is made fanatical by a vision of demoniac spirits and by the grandiose teachings of a temple set among verdant rainforest. And it is the 'Heights of Euphorum' that drives all human aspiration and which inspires all of them in their own way.