The Hardy Boys Study the Renaissance
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Author: Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Title: The Rule of Four Genre: thriller In almost every profession there are graduates of one or two colleges who have been inculcated with the belief that theirs is a superior education simply because they attended the school. In law, it's Harvard. In business, it's Harvard again. In my own profession of geology, it's... well, let's just say it's just up the street from the Coors brewery and leave it at that. The students have had it continuously hammered into their pointy little heads that their last-place classmate is superior to the top grad from any other school, and after four years they completely believe it. So that explains why a couple of Princeton University graduates - Dustin Thomason and Ian Caldwell to be exact - are so afflicted with hubris that they can collaborate on a mystery/thriller in which not one, not two, but no less than four Princeton undergraduates are capable of solving riddles that have stumped the finest minds in the world for almost five centuries. Hey - they're Princeton students, and therefore superior beings. Deliver me! But on to the book... Commencement is fast approaching, and Tom Sullivan seems to have placed his bête noire firmly behind him, disentangling himself from his roommate's senior thesis topic and setting his sights firmly on what's important to college seniors: his own thesis, his sophomore girlfriend, and the upcoming festival season. But wait! Tom's buddy Paul is on the verge of solving the last of the riddles the buried deep within the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a medieval novel upon which Paul has obsessed for the past four years. Given that Tom's late father was one of the foremost experts on the strange book before his untimely death, Tom had also been involved in deciphering the puzzles, so deeply involved that his budding romance with the beauteous Katie Marchand had suffered greatly. Ah, the Hypnerotomachia: reputations have been made and lost; lives have been changed forever by its siren call - including that of Tom's own father. It is a harsh mistress, that awful book - written in (at least) five languages, filled with strange puzzles, and even bearing a few soft-core pornographic woodcuts. Given that the huge volume makes precious little sense (even if you can read all five languages), it's small wonder that it has piqued the interest of a tiny but ferociously competitive group of scholars. And therein lies the crux of The Rule of Four: a mere college undergraduate is on the threshold - five hundred years after it was penned - of the Hypnerotomachia's most deeply hidden secrets, and certain of that little group of scholars will have nothing to do with being upstaged by a 21-year-old. The resultant maelstrom of murder and mayhem, betrayal, young love and lust, and college pranks will leave you scratching your head, almost as much as the puzzles so deeply buried in the Hypnerotomachia. Keep some aspirin at your bedside as you read... Puzzles are big literary business. Not merely The da Vinci Code, which is but one of the latest (and most popular) of the sub-genre, but every mystery thriller ever written. Old books with hidden clues buried under tortuous writing are nothing new, either: even outside the mystery genre you'll find puzzle-solving tales - for example, check out Robert Silverberg's The Book of Skulls, which was reprinted in 1999 after twenty-some years out of print. Caldwell and Thomason took an obscure literary work - the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili actually exists and has indeed puzzled scholars for half a millennium - and built what amounts to a modern-day Hardy Boys mystery around it. I choose the Hardy Boys advisedly, because one feature of the series was that the brothers were invariably smarter than any adult in the vicinity. In this case, four Princeton seniors (and a sophomore) prove more inventive and learned than the assembled scholars of five hundred years. Even more amazing than the level of smarts of the student characters is that at least two of them fluently read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, medieval Italian, and Egyptian hieroglyphics - and here we've been worried that Americans can barely read and write in English. Oops, I forgot - they're Princeton students, and therefore superior beings. As for the Hypnerotomachia itself, the authors inserted a few factoids and known revelations about a fascinating book to lend their story authenticity, but the rest of the tale is (as far as one can tell from the authors' acknowledgments) pure fiction - not that there's anything wrong with fiction. As far as the compilation of puzzles and corresponding solutions is concerned, it's actually fun - but that's about the only thing that's right about the book. What's wrong with the book is legion:
The Rule of Four was a monumental undertaking for Thomason and Caldwell, four or even five years in the writing. It incorporates fascinating bits of knowledge about the humanism and the Renaissance, succeeding nicely in its task of creating and solving a series of puzzles, although the frantic pace with which a couple of college seniors succeed in the undertaking is rather outlandish. But even though the core of the book - those conundrums buried within the Hypnerotomachia - is sound, the plot is far too weak to support its weight. The Rule of Four, then, feels unbalanced: on the one hand we have the intellectual rigor of the scholarship; rigor that is unfortunately encased in a sophomoric plot more worthy of the imaginary Franklin W. Dixon than of the pride of Princeton. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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