The Grounds
Cormac Millar
Penguin Ireland, 2006, 369 pp
Claire Gorrara
The Grounds is
the second book published by Cormac Millar featuring his investigator
Séamus
Joyce. Set in Dublin, The
Grounds, like its predecessor An Irish
Solution,
is firmly anchored in Irish society, politics and culture and dissects
some of the complacencies and corruption of this new tiger economy.
Centred on the fictional university of King 's College, Dublin, The
Grounds lays bare the effects of the ‘reforms' in Higher Education
that have afflicted Ireland in recent decades. With biting satire,
Millar constructs a crime intrigue that involves mercenary university
officials, big business and the onward march of the American commercialization
of Irish Higher Education. The central focus of the novel is Séamus
Joyce, a protagonist who acts as Millar's ‘wandering viewpoint',
able to cast a jaundiced eye on Irish times as a former director
of the Irish Drugs Enforcement Agency but who, as a result of nefarious
dealings in high places, is disgraced and living abroad. Now an emissary
and consultant for Finer Small Campuses of the Western World TM he
is both complicit with and critical of the decimation of academic
integrity he witnessed. Sent to report on the viability of effectively
buying King's College, Dublin for his American masters, he laments
the loss of a much cherished collegiate model but also concedes that
what remains of the college without external funding is teetering
on the brink of extinction.
The darkly comic tone of the novel owes much
to the fact that Cormac Millar writes his roman noir on
the prostitution of Irish Higher Education from experience. As a
distinguished Italianist, the real-life Cormac ÓCuilleanáin
is a university academic at Trinity College, Dublin and so one who
contends with the consequences of such dramatic changes in his professional
life. Whilst the novel is prefaced with the by now well rehearsed: ‘this
novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously',
some of the joy of the novel comes from reader's familiarity with
a cast of character who strike true as either drawn from famous campus
novels (David Lodge springs to mind) or from real life – the self-aggrandising
academic turned administrator, the failed academic now alcoholic
propping up the college bar or the eccentric ‘lone scholar' out of
synch with the current emphasis on collaboration and research income.
None of this is to detract from the pace and plotting of the novel;
gory deaths, sexual intrigue, divided family loyalties and even distant
war crimes that come home to roost. Comedy and tragedy are kept in
a delicate balance and the reader is sometimes unsure how to respond
to the black humour of Millar's prose as one character is bludgeoned
to death by the university mace. After his forays into the Irish
drugs administration (An Irish Solution) and now Higher
Education in The Grounds, it will be a pleasure to see
where next Millar points the spotlight on Irish society.
