Life Class

Ruffey is an image-maker. His life is the raw material for his art. His honeymoon trip to Java with his younger wife Annette is like his paintings, an exercise in discovery. The idyll of the journey, however, is soured by the meeting with the obscure John Ridinghouse, an acquaintance of Annette's, on the slopes of Mount Bromo, because it is from this point that Ruffey can date the germination of a jealousy that continues to grow even when he is back in England.But the real mystery, he finds, is not so much what once occurred between Ridinghouse and Annette. It is rather what Ruffey's friend Pie, a philosopher with a monstrous ego, and Ridinghouse have set up between them.Pitted against these two with their manipulative views of the world, Ruffey takes action, and upon his return to the tropical claustrophobia of Central Java, in the eerie Hotel Manchuria, an answer to the mystery finally presents itself.