The Rule of Four
First edition cover
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| Author | Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | The Dial Press |
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Publication date
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2004 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback, Paperback) |
| Pages | 384 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, hardback) |
| OCLC | 54006990 |
| 813/.6 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3603.A435 R85 2004 |
The Rule of Four is a novel written by the American authors Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, and published in 2004. Caldwell, a Princeton University graduate, and Thomason, a Harvard College graduate, are childhood friends who wrote the book after their graduations.
The Rule of Four reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, where it remained for more than six months.
The book is set on the Princeton campus during Easter weekend in 1999. The story involves four Princeton seniors, both friends and roommates, getting ready for graduation: Tom, Paul, Charlie and Gil. Tom and Paul are trying to solve the mystery contained within an extremely rare, and mysterious book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which was an incunabulum published in 1499 in Venice, Italy; it is a complex allegorical work written in a modified Italian language frequently interspersed with material from other languages as well as its anonymous author's own made-up words.
Tom, the narrator, is the son of a professor who had dedicated his life to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Throughout the novel, he struggles between being fascinated by the book and trying to pull away from the obsession that drew a rift between his father and his mother and is now causing discord between him and his girlfriend, Katie Marchand.
Paul Harris, is a young scholar who is writing his senior thesis on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and has spent all four of his undergraduate years studying the book and is on the edge of solving the book's mystery.
Charlie and Gil are supporting characters to Tom and Paul's project.
The novel charts the relationship between the four roommates and how obsession can be both a boon and a burden. It is a story about growing up as much as solving the mystery of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The disciplines of Renaissance science, history, architecture, and art are drawn upon to solve the mystery.
Tom, or Thomas Corelli Sullivan, often found himself distracted by his father's death. His father was a close friend of Richard Curry and Vincent Taft, both of them advisors for Paul's thesis. The flashback goes on as Taft distanced himself from both Curry and Tom's father at some point to carry out his own research. Taft also developed a rivalry with both men in the quest to decode the Hypnerotomachia's 500-year-old secret. By luck, Tom's father found a letter, dating back to Renaissance times, referring to the book's supposed author, Francesco Colonna. Tom's father even wrote a book, The Belladona Document, which revolves around the mysterious letter. But, a negative critique from his academic rival Vincent Taft spelled the demise of the book's popularity as well as his career. Taft allegedly also stole a diary written by a contemporary of Colonna's that Curry had found. That diary, as Paul and Tom discovered it later, would prove to help the duo to decode the elusive Hypnerotomachia.
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