How to beat long car trips: The Rule of Bore

Going on long car trips – to Seattle from Spokane, say – is the best way to listen to audiobooks. On my way to the Seattle International Film Festival over the weekend I listened to an abridged version of Dorothy Allison’s “Cavedweller” on the way over, and most of Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s “The Rule of Four” on the way back. I disliked the first one, though maybe it was as much because of the barely competent reading by Dean Robertson as it was my dislike of family squabbling passed off as “love.”

Far better was “The Rule of Four,” which has been called “the thinking person’s ‘Da Vinci Code.’ ” That’s a bit unfair, because if nothing else Dan Brown ’s book is immensely readable. Brown has developed a kind of movie-serial style that leaves the reader hanging at the end of every sequence; his characters are shallow and their relationships go nowhere, and his workmanlike prose boasts the occasional cliché, but he literally pulls you along with the energy of his plotting.

“The Rule of Four,” by contrast is a much better written novel. It’s just that Caldwell and Thomason can’t help but show off their Ivy League educations. Much of what happens feels, to someone who barely got through high school algebra 1, like one long McGuffin passed off as an ancient riddle. Yet Hamilton (“The Bourne Identity”) has a pleasing voice, can distinguish between different characters fairly well and at least knows how to pronounce Italian. His voice, the story and a couple of Starbucks grande americanos made the four and a half hour trip go by faster than you can say, hmmmm, “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.”