Book #108

The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason


I rushed this one, trying to get it in before the year was ended; I managed to read it in about 24 hours, and so here we are with the 108th and final book of 2008.

It was okay: the writing was excellent, the characters were nice, but the plot was a little bland. The setting didn't help, either, as it did not lend itself to either interesting stories or characterizations and descriptions that I could relate to -- though I'm sure Princeton alumni loved every second of it. The basic story begins with four friends, all seniors at Princeton, who are heading into their last month at the school. Charlie is moving on to become a doctor, though he hasn't picked a med school yet; Gil has no apparent plans, but also little need of them owing to his family's wealth and his own general competence and winning personality; Tom, the narrator, has to make a decision whether he wants to pursue a PhD in Literature, or take a job offer from an internet startup with more money than mission in its business model. The last of the four, Paul is still working on his senior thesis, and time is running out. But Paul's thesis is not simple: he is looking to solve a 500-year-old riddle, in the form of a mysterious and puzzling book from the 15th century.

The good part about this book was definitely in the character interactions. The authors did an excellent job of making these friends seem both realistic, and special in their abilities and their bond with each other; they also wrote an outstanding romance, between Tom and his girlfriend, Katie, who forces Tom to choose between his own share in Paul's obsession with the ancient book -- a book that Tom's own father spent his life trying to decipher, a pastime that influenced Tom in more ways than he knows -- and his ever-growing love for her. Although the romance ends well, it is not a simple, happily-ever-after story, which was both refreshing and annoying, as such endings are. The villains in this book, though they do not dominate the storyline -- the focus is as much on the friendships as anything else -- are outstanding: mysterious, vile, infuriating, and also realistic and very much complex human beings, just like the heroes.

My complaint about this book relates to the mysterious book. The mystery was not terribly interesting, nor was the solution; the Rule of Four is nothing deserving of a title reference, despite a weak attempt to make it more meaningful than it was. And while I was pleased to get the answer, it was far too obscure to have any real meaning for me personally; this is a mystery, a solution, and a set of implications that really only matter for Renaissance scholars, which I ain't. So while I liked reading about these people -- apart from the unconscious elitism, such as when the narrator castigates himself for leaving Katie in the lurch when she needs him: when she is dealing with the pressure of applying for membership in one of the exclusive Princeton dining clubs. Yeah. That's rough. -- I didn't really care for the events they were going through, which made me want the book to move on from its own plot. This is not the way a thriller should read.

All in all, I'd like to read another book by these authors, as long as it isn't set in an Ivy league school and it doesn't center around a five-hundred-year-old diary.