Rule of Four

We were rushing off somewhere else when we called at the library to change our books so I grabbed this one off the shelf rather quickly. The blurb compared it with [a:Umberto Eco|1730|Umberto Eco|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1455915753p2/1730.jpg], but it also compared it with [a:Dan Brown|630|Dan Brown|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1399396714p2/630.jpg]. There was no time to look for another, however, so I just took it and hoped for the best.

When we got home my son, who had worked in a bookshop, recalled that it had been compared a lot with Dan Brown's books about 12 years ago, so I was prepared for the worst, but was rather pleasantly surprised. Umberto Eco it isn't. I gave five stars to [b:Foucault's Pendulum|17841|Foucault's Pendulum|Umberto Eco|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1396645125s/17841.jpg|11221066], and one star to [b:The da Vinci code|968|The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)|Dan Brown|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1303252999s/968.jpg|2982101], but i think this one warrants three=and-a-half.

[b:The rule of four|18431|The Rule of Four|Ian Caldwell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389185899s/18431.jpg|3805] is about four friends, final year undergraduates at Princeton University, two of whom are majoring in literature, and one of them, Paul Harris, is studying the [b:Hypnerotomachia|20984281|Hypnerotomachia|Severin Rossetti|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1394277079s/20984281.jpg|40361350] while another, the narrator, Tom Sullivan, is the son of a student of the same book, though he himself is working on Mary Shelley's [b:Frankenstein|18490|Frankenstein|Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1381512375s/18490.jpg|4836639].

It appears that the Hypnerotomachia, is a real book about Poliphilo's dream struggle for the love of Polia, so it's not a fictional one like the one mentioned in [b:The da Vinci code|968|The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)|Dan Brown|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1303252999s/968.jpg|2982101], which my son said people kept coming into the book shop to ask for, and would not believe him when he told them it was a fictional work in a work of fiction. Even when I got to the end of this book, however, I found it difficult to pronounce the title.

Paul Harris believes that the Hypnerotomachia contains a secret code, and much of the plot of the book is devoted to discovering what it is, which I suppose accounts for the similarity with [b:The da Vinci code|968|The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)|Dan Brown|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1303252999s/968.jpg|2982101], but it is not nearly as facile as the latter. The plot also involves academic rivalries which lead to murder, and at some points that is rather unconvincing, and the narrative seems to jump about rather inexplicably.

It none the less kept my interest to the end, even though some parts seemed rather implausible. The book has several illustrations in it, and it would have helped if a map of the Princeton campus had been included among them.

I find I rather like books of this genre -- books about literary studies of other books, or authors, where there was some mystery about them that needed to be solved. There didn't seem to be a list for that genre, so I created one, and hope others will add similar books to the list, so I can add them to my to-read list.