Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
Big Book on Campus
By Anthony Grafton
The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Dial, 372 pp., $24.00
Fiction—even genre fiction—carries us into worlds we don't know. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories bring the imperial London of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries back to life—and make us feel, as nothing else can, the weird brilliance of late Victorian Positivism. John le Carré's spy novels preserve the post-imperial London of the Sixties and Seventies—and can make the young feel, as few other books can, the strange public numbness of the cold-war era. In some ways, the conventional nature of their plots—which assume that all mysteries will, in the end, be solved, even if justice doesn't always triumph—makes these stories, at their best, particularly effective at giving the feel of a city or a closed society like the Secret Service.
Review, 4752 words
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