The Rule of Four: An Academic Bore

Review by Leah Stratmann November 4, 2004 Issue

While The Rule of Four may well be a terrific novel, you won’t hear that from me. I found the plot plodding and sometimes hard to follow. Comparisons have been made to the Da Vinci Code, but the only thing the two books have in common are secrets buried in code for hundreds of years. While Code zipped right along, throwing in historical orts, this book seems to suffer from having two authors, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. There are parts of the book rich with dialog and action and others delving more deeply into ancient history than I wanted to go. It would seem one writer is responsible for each of these two disparate writing approaches.

The central story concerns four roommates at Princeton. One of them is the narrator Thomas, son of a Renaissance scholar who spent his life studying the rare (and real) book called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The book also fascinates another of the roommates named Paul. Tom feels as if his father spent more time on the book than he did with his family and is wary of being pulled into further research on it with Paul, who has based his senior thesis on a hypothesis of Tom’s father. That hypothesis was that the book’s author was an upper class Roman, rather than the widely held view of a monk authoring the book. As Paul comes closer and closer to proving this theory, there is academic betrayal and a murder or two, forays into steam tunnels, and lectures on ancient history.

While most of the action concerns Easter weekend on campus, we are taken back in time to when Paul and Tom meet, we are given glimpses into Tom and Paul’s formative years. There is limited interaction with the other two roommates, one headed for a career in business and the other bound for medical school. Much of the book details how life is lived on the campus of Princeton University, with eating clubs that are analogous to fraternities and sororities, and the sometimes fierce competition to join those clubs. There is a love interest for Tom, which is often in jeopardy, as he is pulled deeper and deeper into the final search for the book’s truth with Paul.

Every time I read the title of the book, which forms the novel’s plot, I stumbled, having no idea how it is pronounced and no real interest either. Perhaps the faults I find with the book are academic failings of mine, as the book has been on bestseller lists for weeks and weeks. It is entirely possible I am missing something, but as an avid reader with interest in many things, this book simply did not grab me. It might grab you though.

The Rule of Four, Dial Press, 368 pages and available at book retailers and local libraries.

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