Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four (Dell Publishing Company 2005)
Princeton thriller complete with secret codes, Florentine friars, hidden crypts, sealing wax, ancient diaries and assorted Renaissance occult lore.
Princeton 1999. Two students are on the verge of solving the mysteries of a (historically existing) 15th-century Venetian text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris are launched into an adventure that ends with a murder. The story is set in a world of spectacular practical jokes and interclub rivalry that is Princeton culture – eating club ‘bickering’, arch singing, the Good Friday sermon and banquet, togas, limericks, steam tunnels, the annual stealing of the Bell Clapper from Nassau Hall, and even the now defunct Nude Olympics.
The Hypnerotomachia tells of the dreams of Poliphilo, and the text, studied before him by Tom’s father—dead from an accident that let Tom with scars—is known for its hypnotic effect on its readers.
Nov 1497. Two messengers bring a letter sealed 4 times in dark wax to San Lorenzo church near the Vatican. After dire warnings not to read the letter, they open it anyway. The wax contains belladonna. When he discovered their treachery, a Mason at the church slew them. Tom’s father discovered this fact from a letter from Francesco Colonna and publishes a book containing his ‘Belladonna Document’. He claims that the author of the Hypnerotomachia was not the monk Colonna but rather a Roman aristocrat. The monk Colonna was a confessed rapist, where the aristocrat was a model of virtue.
With one month left before graduation Tom is in his dorm room with Paul, Charlie and Gil. Charlie suggests a game of laser tag in the steam tunnels. Chased by proctors and campus police, they pop up in the middle of the Nude Olympics.
Someone is murdered, but the incident is dropped while other storylines are progressed, which seems unrealistic to me. In real life, the students would have demanded at the scene to know who it was. In a final riddle, Colonna includes geographical information leading to his secret crypt, encoded in a ‘rule of four’.
I wonder if the ‘cornuta code’ Tom and Paul discover, revealing the secret message from Colonna, is really there in the actual book.
In places the story jumps unconvincingly back and forth in time. Sometimes it reads like fine literature, unlike the Da Vinci Code to which it is compared. For example, Tom’s love story with Katie is told beautifully. It has a bit of a ‘fizzle out’ ending. After the grand finale, a few more chapters say what happened to everybody, who got jobs where. Also, maybe I missed it, but was the mystery actually solved?
Susie Helme 
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