THRILLER
Impressive debut
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The publicists are comparing The Rule of Four to The Name of the Rose, but Campbell and Thomason have a much livelier way with words than the translated Umberto Eco we have access to.'
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AT the centre of this novel by two first-time authors is another book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a convoluted and arcane Renaissance narrative written in several languages. It tells of a man's dream about searching for his love and has puzzled scholars for five centuries. As The Rule of Four opens, a Princeton University undergraduate is about to work out its mystery.
The hero of the novel is Paul, a brilliant student with a solitary, orphaned past who has been obsessed with the old book for years. The narrator is his friend Tom, whose father first discovered the possibility that the book was in code. Their roommates Charles and Gil square out this likeable group.
The authors are young enough to remember and vividly put across the fever of students approaching the end of their undergraduate careers. As the novel opens, the four friends are heading out to a game in the steam tunnels underlying the university campus, and they are anxious, complacent, obsessed in various degrees. (Our fear that the proposed game will turn into a tedious quidditch for grown-ups is fortunately cut short by the quickening pace of the story.) The details throughout are naturally spot on, since one author is from Princeton and the other from Harvard, and the Ivy League ethos of high intellectual sport sustained by good living is presented in the best light. The way the two code-crackers and their friends work on "Paul's" thesis shows the sheer joy and privilege of their humanities education, the kind of springboard from which they dive into any waters they like. It is an intellectual standard directly descended from the Renaissance ideal. The authors also write authentically about the friendship and collaboration between Paul and Tom, revealing incidentally a great deal about their own relationship.
The book is far more unified than one might expect from a two-author work. There are three chronological threads in the narrative: the present run-up to Paul's senior thesis deadline, the events of a couple of decades before, when Tom's father and two other scholars collaborated and ultimately fought over the same book, and the distant past, in which the original tale was set. The events of the novel take place over Easter weekend, and the theme of rebirth surfaces ultimately in a most satisfying manner.
By the later half of the novel, the story behind the story is as real as the doings of the undergrads. That original tale, long hidden in ciphers and codes, centres on the powerful conflict between the Renaissance humanist Francesco Colonna and the fanatic Florentine monk Savonarola, one that is intellectual in essence and at the same time a matter of life and death. Colonna expresses his despair that the love of learning and the arts will survive the Reformists' insistence on salvation as the only allowable endeavour: "I did long ago hope that men wished to be delivered from ignorance, just as slaves wish to be freed from bondage. It is a condition unbecoming our dignity, and contrary to our nature. Yet I find now that the race of men is a cowardly thing, a perversion like the owl of my riddle, which though it might enjoy sunlight, prefers darkness."
The implacable oppositions of art and religious reform in the 15th Century are juxtaposed neatly with the smooth evolution of religious customs into academic traditions at Princeton — in this case, the transformation of a thundering Good Friday sermon into a lecture on the language of violence, illustrated with slides, and hot chocolate and petit fours served up afterwards.
All these things make the book a piece of artful literature. And readers have always been fascinated with books about books, art about art. But even in the 20th Century, the clash of ideas, and the theft of ideas, can lead to betrayal and murder, and this is what makes The Rule of Four a ripping yarn as well. Even as the undergrads are stirring their hot chocolate, a research assistant is shot dead, and the language of violence is no longer just an academic subject. In seeking out the murderer, Paul realises that his four-year study was so original his mentors had planned to steal it from him. The discovery orphans him all over again.
Convincing characters
Like the better thriller writers, Campbell and Thomason flesh out their characters with a convincing past and future. Tom has an on-and-off relationship with Katie, a sophomore who solves a couple of riddles herself but (just like a woman) likes to keep things in perspective. The terms on which they stand at the end of the novel are ambiguous but hopeful. In their sense of balance, the undergrads are certainly wise beyond their years. When Tom says he has chosen Katie over the Hypnerotomachia, Paul tells him, "It's better to love something that loves you back." Their friendship is solid throughout, and it ultimately survives death.
The publicists are comparing The Rule of Four to The Name of the Rose, but Campbell and Thomason have a much livelier way with words than the translated Umberto Eco we have access to. And the way their mystery and the lives of the protagonists work out is more deeply gratifying. It is more likely to recall another literary-historical mystery, A.S. Byatt's Possession. These first-time authors cannot be expected to approach the literary range and emotional depth of Byatt's work, but here they have given us humanity, hope, and passion. Best of all, in the last chapter, they dazzle us with a vision of a new story to come.
LATHA ANANTHARAMAN
The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, Century, 2004, p.384, £9.99.
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