The Club

Würger’s chilling if obvious debut opens as Hans Stichler, an orphaned German 19-year-old, is contacted by his English aunt, Alexandra Birk. She teaches art history at Cambridge and says that she can get him accepted into St. John’s College, but there’s a catch: she wants him to infiltrate a Cambridge institution known as the Pitt Club, which is 200 years old and whose members past and present are generations of the English establishment. To help him, Aunt Alex introduces Hans to one of her PhD students, Charlotte, whose father, financier Sir Angus Farewell, is a former member of the club. Charlotte arranges a dinner with Hans and her father, so the latter can nominate the former to the club. Despite Charlotte’s initial reservations about Hans, they are soon an item. A boxer for the school’s highly competitive varsity team, Hans is asked to join the Butterflies, a secret subset of the Pitt Club. Delving into the real purpose of this club-within-a-club, Hans finds sinister links to Charlotte, Aunt Alex, and Angus on the way to a dramatic and inevitable ending. Though it moves at a good pace, the novel is contrived in its depiction of upper-class snobbism, hypocrisy, and corruption, resulting in a diverting if thin story.[em] (Mar.) [/em]