The Rule of Four

Having heard this mentioned as 'Dan Brown for people without massive brain damage' I was very interested to see if it would live up to that (admittedly faint) praise. The Rule of Four, about two Princeton students obsession for the secrets locked in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, doesn't disappoint.

In contrast with the action-packed, Mary Sue-riddled work of Brown 'The Rule of Four' might seem positively boring. There are deaths, murders in fact, ancient treasures, riddles hidden in the text of the book by the use of cryptography and steganography and yet there are no chase scenes, no exploding buildings or larger than life villains. It feels like something that could happen, not something that could be shot as a movie.

What 'The Rule show more of Four' does have is characters you grow to care about, people who operate in a moral shade of grey where obsession and love battle for attention throughout their life. I've never set foot on an American university campus and yet I felt like I belonged there, drawn into the atmosphere by Caldwell and Thomason.

The main antagonist, scholar Vincent Taft, is equally convincing as a brilliant but petty man who can't abide to see his work reduced to nothing by a young student and his fellows and the protagonists' friends are real, not handy plot devices to pull the story along.

I enjoyed it immensely. show less

This tale of four Princeton students trying to discover a coded message in an ancient Renaissance text could have been worthwhile. Alas, besides a few interesting insights into Renaissance history, this book disappoints on almost every imaginable level.

Not that Da Vinci code sets the bar very high, but the plot of Rule of Four lurches from boring to preposterous, with the authors occassionally achieving both of these states simultaneously, which I suppose is a literary feat of sorts. Long, tedious chapters about undergrad life at Princeton, a half dozen pointless subplots, and awkward/unconvincing character development alternate with brief moments of action that feel contrived and silly. There's simply no logical reason for the boys to show more expend all that time and energy evading police inquiries that can't possibly implicate them; no explanation for why the boys suddenly figure out how to unlock codes whose solutions have eluded them for years; and no excuse for the preposterous motive attributed to the baddie of the piece.

Above all, if you're going to market yourself as a Da Vinci code rival, you need a boffo reveal at the end ... something like, say, Jesus was married! The secret revealed at the end of this tale is neither original nor particularly interesting. Even worse (from a plotting standpoint), it's buried after a long passage of endnote-type text, way after whatever shreds of suspense the authors managed to generate have unravelled and you're just wishing the thing would dribble to an end.

Rarely have I ever read a book that was in more desperate need of workshopping! I have to believe a group of professional writers, given the chance, would have warned the authors that (1) giving characters elaborate backstories doesn't necessarily make them interesting or likeable, (2) manufacturing/sustaining suspense requires pacing and a credible threat, (3) if you're going to write a book about codes and puzzles, your readers are going to expect you to sustain a certain standard of logic, and (4) leave present tense to the professionals! show less

It wanted to be The Secret History by Donna Tartt, but didn't quite make it. I did mostly enjoy it, but I just didn't get Tom's reluctance to work on the Hypnerotomachia. And especially the whole choosing between his girlfriend and the book. Dork. I would have been so behind figuring out a riddle that puzzled scholars for centuries. And so behind going to Rome when the riddle was figured out. I also knew who the killer was pretty early on. In other words, I wasn't driven to finish the book as much as I should have been. Wait for paperback.

Where Do I Sign Up for a Refund?
This book is the work of amateurs. Plot elements are laid bare with only superficial attempts at building suspense. The central quartet of characters are shallow and unendearing. This reads more like a freshman guide to Princeton than a mystery novel. The 'mystery' of the book is dull and predictable, and the 'climax' was reminiscent of bad sexual experiences - unfulfilling and making me happy it was over. Instead of buying this book, light a $20 bill on fire. It will save you from wasting time on this pathetic story and you can warm your hands with it.

The "Rule of Three" in Freemasonry refers to the ritual pronunciation of a secret word that can only be properly spoken "in a trible voice," i.e. by three initiates working together. Similarly, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's bestseller debut novel The Rule of Four concerns itself with a secret that is only accessed by the combined efforts of four Princeton University roommates. The text of the novel never mentions the Masonic Rule of Three, and instead explains the title as the name for a purported textual code. But that sort of indirection is not out of keeping for a book that is preoccupied with tacit allusions as riddles.

While the publishers have understandably chosen to pitch The Rule of Four to the enormous (and apparently show more undiscriminating) DaVinci Code market, the bestseller to which it most deserves comparison is Arturo Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas. Not only are both of them fast-paced, literary thrillers, but they share a thematic concern with the phenomena of textual obsession and multiple authorship. In the case of The Rule of Four, there are actually two credited authors of the novel itself, a pair of men who "have been best friends since they were eight years old," who have now written what they describe as "a book about friendship."

Perez-Reverte invented the diabolist tome The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows by Aristide Torchia (Venice 1666) as the obsessive focus for his novel. Certain features of that imaginary book--its scarcity and value, offensiveness to Christian sensibilities, provocative woodcut illustrations, and impenetrable text--suggest that it may have been modeled on the actual Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice 1499), which serves as the enigmatic text around which The Rule of Four is constructed. At this point, I drop the third-person objectivity of the reviewer, since I wrote my own Doctorandus Degree Thesis on the Hypnerotomachia.

Caldwell and Thomason write (in the voice of their principal character): "My father, who understood the way the Hypnerotomachia had seduced him, once compared the book to an affair with a woman. It makes you lie, he said, even to yourself." (98) The authors have perhaps lied to themselves a little regarding the feasibility of the code that their characters discover in the Hypnerotomachia, and they resolve the authorship controversy regarding this superfically anonymous book differently than my studies have led me to do. But I admit that my breath caught with wonder at the possibility that they had shared some of my own discoveries about the book, when the solution to one of its alleged riddles was approached through a Thomas More quote regarding a game "rather like chess" involving "a pitched battle between virtues and vices." (202-03) But I was relieved to find that, after all, these novelists and I were not unwittingly duplicating each other's ideas.

I recommend Hypnerotomachia translator Joscelyn Godwin's "unauthorized guide" to the novel: The Real Rule of Four, which exposes some of the points where Caldwell and Thomason get their history wrong, and fascinating points that they missed. Despite its inaccuracies and failings, The Rule of Four is an elegant, engaging read, with its own literary depth. It is a fiction, and its claims about the Hypnerotomachia text are inventive (and sometimes quite unlikely). But in one lovely passage of sustained metaphor with multiple allusions, the authors highlight the power of fiction:

"For a moment I feel like Sancho Panza, listening to Don Quixote. The giants he sees are nothing but windmills, I know, and yet he's the one who sees clearly in the dark, and I'm the one doubting my eyes. Maybe that's been the rub all along, I think: we are animals of imagination. Only a man who sees giants can ever stand upon their shoulders."

The imaginative vision of The Rule of Four makes it a worthwhile read. show less

I am profoundly glad that I didn’t get this in hardcover. And that I bought it for $4 at Sam’s Club.

Holy shit what a weird mash of things going on here. For one, the authors truly wished to showcase their knowledge of Princeton and its inner workings. They needed to go out of their way to show us they were on the inside of some pretty intimate aspects of the school and its traditions. Yawn.

And then there was the whole character of Paul and Tom. I highly doubt that Tom if given a choice between spending time with a girl, and spending time with a guy and a musty old book, would actually choose the latter. College boys are not this dedicated to scholarship. Especially on some dry tome that basically drove Tom’s father to obsession show more and death before even coming close to the meaning of it all. And Paul is worse; he doesn’t even have a token girlfriend to distract him from his thesis. A thesis as an undergrad? How weird. But he too is a driven scholar who has no social life and thinks he can crack the mystery that smarter men have failed to crack.

Which brings me to the 3rd thing; why are these boys so light years ahead of their predecessors? It makes no sense that people with decades of learning into subjects not even broached by Paul and Tom should fail to unlock the secret of the book. Two kids with barely enough hormones between them to have a wet dream are the ones to unlock the visceral secrets of this ancient text…yeah right.

The idea of a mystery within an otherwise strange but innocuous text is a good one. But using college kids as a way to solve it when many others have gone before is a stretch. And the ending being a map and directions to a centuries old cache of hidden art treasures that would have otherwise been burned by fanatics is a really odd mystery. Compounded by the fact that they cryptically show one boy signaling to the other via equally cryptic messages that he has found said cache and go join him yonder, well that’s just out of the tethers of reality. That and the fact that none of it seems to have decayed despite the lack of hermetic sealing technology.

Bah. show less

This was a really good read; not mentally taxing or anything, but still relatively suspenseful. I think the description on the cover from one of the reviewers sums it up best; it's a puzzle book. The story does that thing where it intertwines present action and past action. Most of the book is about the main characters solving this puzzle that is hidden in a very old book. No one has been able to figure it out for a very long time and they finally make a breakthrough (one of them is working on the book as his college thesis). The action actually kind of catches you off-guard because you get so wrapped up in the puzzle solving parts that when something actually happens (like someone getting hurt) it seems unreal, like it doesn't fit. But show more then thinking about it in actual chronological order, it does fit. The flow is odd like that. Thinking about it, though, the odd flow and the disconnect from reality and getting sucked into the puzzle is exactly what the characters are experiencing so it really works.

Overall it was a very good read; refreshing. show less