The Rabbit Club and Oxford University

I recently reviewed the new Netflix movie My Oxford Year, which is a brainless story about an American woman pursuing a yearlong master’s degree at Oxford University, where she develops a romantic relationship with a graduate student who is also her terminally ill professor. I imagine that most viewers will find the movie frustrating because it seemingly has two different plots, the first focused on the experience of moving abroad for school and the second on a relationship strained by unfortunate circumstances (although at no point is it clear why they like each other, since all their conversations amount to lame teasing). However, I was particularly annoyed by the depiction of the university and its student culture. In My Oxford Year, every interaction is shallow, all comments are devoid of substance, and most strangely, the main character is treated by everyone as so noticeably foreign that she is almost unintelligible. I am happy to report, though, that the pop-culture representation of the American studying abroad in Oxford is rectified in the new novel The Rabbit Club, by Christopher J. Yates, now available in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Alistair “Ali” McCain arrives at Oxford University in the 1990s for a three-year undergraduate degree in literature. He was encouraged to apply by a high school teacher who gave him a copy of Brideshead Revisited, but he also has a deeply personal motive for studying in England: He hopes to meet his father, a famous British rock star who has a long list of estranged children. On campus, Ali quickly makes some friends, most of whom are also English-literature students. Unsurprisingly, the literature students are anti-capitalist and anti-elitist, while the girls specifically are capable of reading great works only through a feminist praxis. By contrast, Ali’s roommate William Wynn-Goode — an obvious caricature of Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative Party politician and former member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet, whose time at Oxford overlapped with that of the author of The Rabbit Club — is a vaguely conservative aristocrat. (Wynn-Goode is more elitist than he is explicitly right-wing.) Over the course of their first year, Wynn-Goode puts Ali through the hazing process to join a mysterious secret society called the Rabbit Club, and things take a dark turn.

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Abigail Anthony

Abigail Anthony is a staff writer at National Review.

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I recently reviewed the new Netflix movie My Oxford Year, which is a brainless story about an American woman pursuing a yearlong master’s degree at Oxford University, where she develops a romantic relationship with a graduate student who is also her terminally ill professor. I imagine that most viewers will find the movie frustrating because it seemingly has two different plots, the first focused on the experience of moving abroad for school and the second on a relationship strained by unfortunate circumstances (although at no point is it clear why they like each other, since all their conversations amount to lame teasing). However, I was particularly annoyed by the depiction of the university and its student culture. In My Oxford Year, every interaction is shallow, all comments are devoid of substance, and most strangely, the main character is treated by everyone as so noticeably foreign that she is almost unintelligible. I am happy to report, though, that the pop-culture representation of the American studying abroad in Oxford is rectified in the new novel The Rabbit Club, by Christopher J. Yates, now available in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Alistair “Ali” McCain arrives at Oxford University in the 1990s for a three-year undergraduate degree in literature. He was encouraged to apply by a high school teacher who gave him a copy of Brideshead Revisited, but he also has a deeply personal motive for studying in England: He hopes to meet his father, a famous British rock star who has a long list of estranged children. On campus, Ali quickly makes some friends, most of whom are also English-literature students. Unsurprisingly, the literature students are anti-capitalist and anti-elitist, while the girls specifically are capable of reading great works only through a feminist praxis. By contrast, Ali’s roommate William Wynn-Goode — an obvious caricature of Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative Party politician and former member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet, whose time at Oxford overlapped with that of the author of The Rabbit Club — is a vaguely conservative aristocrat. (Wynn-Goode is more elitist than he is explicitly right-wing.) Over the course of their first year, Wynn-Goode puts Ali through the hazing process to join a mysterious secret society called the Rabbit Club, and things take a dark turn.