This article relates to the 2004 novel. For the legal term, see Rule of four

Rule of four

The rule of four is a Supreme Court of the United States practice that permits four of the nine justices to grant a writ of certiorari. This is done specifically to prevent a majority of the Court from controlling the Court's docket...

.

The Rule of Four is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 written by American authors Ian Caldwell

Ian Caldwell

Ian Caldwell is an American novelist. After graduating from Princeton University in 1998, he and his childhood friend Dustin Thomason co-wrote the semi-autobiographical The Rule of Four, which was published in 2004....

 and Dustin Thomason

Dustin Thomason

Dustin Thomason is an American writer. He co-wrote the 2004 novel The Rule of Four with his childhood friend Ian Caldwell.The Rule of Four reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list, where it remained for more than six months. The book was a number-one national and international...

, and published in 2004. Caldwell, a Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 graduate, and Thomason, a Harvard College

Harvard College

Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

 graduate, are childhood friends who wrote the book after their respective 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 was a no. 1 national and international bestseller and has been translated into more than 25 languages. It has sold more than four million copies worldwide, and was the best-selling debut novel

Debut novel

A debut novel is the first novel an author publishes. Debut novels are the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to publish in the future...

 of the decade. It is currently being developed by Warner Brothers as a feature film

Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...

.

Plot summary

The book is set on the Princeton campus during the weekend of Good Friday

Good Friday

Good Friday , is a religious holiday observed primarily by Christians commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary. The holiday is observed during Holy Week as part of the Paschal Triduum on the Friday preceding Easter Sunday, and may coincide with the Jewish observance of...

, 1999. The story involves four Princeton senior

Senior (education)

Senior is a term used in the United States to describe a student in the 4th year of study .-High school:...

s, friends and roommates, getting ready for graduation: Tom, Paul, Charlie and Gil. Two of the students, Tom and Paul, are trying to solve the mystery contained within an extremely rare, beautifully decorated

Woodcut

Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...

 and very mysterious book— the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , called in English Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream, is a romance said to be by Francesco Colonna and a famous example of early printing...

. This very real book was published as an incunabulum

Incunabulum

Incunable, or sometimes incunabulum is a book, pamphlet, or broadside, that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe...

 in 1499 in Venice; it is a complex allegorical

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

 work written in a bizarrely modified Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 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.

His roommate, Paul Harris, is a brilliant young scholar who is writing his undergraduate

Undergraduate education

Undergraduate education is an education level taken prior to gaining a first degree . Hence, in many subjects in many educational systems, undergraduate education is post-secondary education up to the level of a bachelor's degree, such as in the United States, where a university entry level is...

 thesis

Thesis

A dissertation or thesis is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings...

 on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. He has spent all four of his undergraduate years studying the book and is close to a breakthrough.

Charlie Freeman, the roommate who acts as the parent of the four friends and Gil, heir to a wealthy East Coast banking family 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

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 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, once a Hypnerotomachia scholar too, was a close friend of Richard Curry and Vincent Taft, both of them being advisors for Paul in his 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 Hypnerotomachias 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

Francesco Colonna

Francesco Colonna was an Italian Dominican priest and monk who was credited with the authorship of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by an acrostic in the text.He lived in Venice, and preached at St. Mark's Cathedral...

. 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 Tom's father's 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.

In the end, Paul discovers that the Hypnerotomachia contains a number of hidden and encyphered

Classical cipher

A cipher is a means of concealing a message, where letters of the message are substituted or transposed for other letters, letter pairs, and sometimes for many letters. In cryptography, a classical cipher is a type of cipher that was used historically but now has fallen, for the most part, into...

 texts, with the solution to each one revealing a clue towards the next one. However, after solving a chain of several of these, he finds a text that says that there will be no more clues and he must solve the rest of the book on his own. He realizes that the entire book contains a message encoded by following a "rule of four", in which the message starts with one letter, then moves to a letter four rows down, then ten columns right, then two rows up, then two columns left, and repeating. The placement of this hidden text throughout the entire book explains the Hypnerotomachias strange syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

, use of multiple languages, and neologisms. Through days of tough work, Paul and Tom managed to unravel a series of riddle

Riddle

A riddle is a statement or question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas, which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and...

s, which they solved soon later. The application of the "rule of four" method enabled the duo to slowly piece together portions of a dark Renaissance secret that has avoided human knowledge for centuries.

The author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Francesco Colonna, was a humanist

Renaissance humanism

Renaissance humanism was an activity of cultural and educational reform engaged by scholars, writers, and civic leaders who are today known as Renaissance humanists. It developed during the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval...

 in Renaissance Florence. He was an ardent fan of knowledge, books, arts and anything that has a Renaissance identity on it. His passion for Greek and Roman literature was immense. But, one Girolamo Savonarola

Girolamo Savonarola

Girolamo Savonarola was an Italian Dominican friar, Scholastic, and an influential contributor to the politics of Florence from 1494 until his execution in 1498. He was known for his book burning, destruction of what he considered immoral art, and what he thought the Renaissance—which began in his...

 saw the exact opposite ; Florence is gradually turning into an free-thinkin

Freethought

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...

g city, with its people starting to forget God and worshipping knowledge. As soon as he grasps power in Florence, Savonarola started the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities

Bonfire of the Vanities

Bonfire of the Vanities refers to the burning of objects that are deemed to be occasions of sin. The most infamous one took place on 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned thousands of objects like cosmetics, art, and books in...

, a practice of burning books and art that seemed to contain elements of blasphemy

Blasphemy

Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...

. Colonna could not stand this practice and confronted Girolamo Savonarola himself as a sign of protest, only to be disappointed. Colonna started the building of a large underground vault

Bank vault

A bank vault is a secure space where money, valuables, records, and documents can be stored. It is intended to protect their contents from theft, unauthorized use, fire, natural disasters, and other threats, just like a safe...

 to seal away a number of ancient books and pieces of art to preserve them from the followers of the priest. On one occasion, to prove his stand, Francesco and two of his men walked onto the raging inferno of the bonfire. As a result, Francesco met a fiery end. As he expected, the death of Francesco sparked cry against the reign of Savonarola, who was later hanged and burnt to ashes. Before dying, Colonna wrote the Hypnerotomachia, a book of codes on his efforts to uplift humanism

Humanism

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....

 despite religious dogma

Dogma

Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...

s. He disguises its contents in a seemingly innocent piece of Renaissance romantic literature

Romance (genre)

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...

, concerning the love between Poliphilo and Polia. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili itself meant "Poliphilo's Stuggle of Love in a Dream".

It also turns out that Paul's friend Bill Stein and his thesis advisor Vincent Taft were conspiring together to steal Paul's thesis and claim credit for it, and the sealed vault of treasures. They were murdered by Paul's wealthy but unstable benefactor Richard Curry to prevent this from happening.

In a final struggle between a team of Tom, Gil and Paul against Richard Curry, a fire breaks out at Ivy Club, a Princeton eating club of which Gil is the president. After much persuasion by both Tom and Paul to save each other from the fire, Tom jumps out of a window to be rescued by the firemen. Paul does not manage to do so, leading both Tom and Gil to assume that he must have died in the fire together with Curry.

Five years pass. Charlie is already married with two children; Tom is still traumatised by the event that occurred that day. He has subsequently become a software analyst and gotten engaged to another woman, only for it to fail later. One day, he receives a tube in the mail containing an authentic ancient (and unknown) Botticelli canvas. The tube has a mysterious return address in Florence, Italy. Tom realises the address is a code by his long lost friend Paul Harris, urging him to head towards Italy soon. The story ends with Tom packing his clothes and reconnecting with Katie by phone, telling her that he is leaving for Italy and that he wants to see her when he returns.

Literary significance and criticism

The book has been well-received by critics, with the New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...

calling it "the ultimate puzzle book", and several others comparing it positively to the Da Vinci Code. It received an aggregate score of 74 out of 100 (based on 17 reviews) on the review aggregator Metacritic

Metacritic

Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

.

External links

• The Rule of Four Official Website