It was meant to be a university in perpetual motion, a university that would never succumb to complacency, a university never destined for middle-age. But that was then…
Now, as the new millenium approaches, Sparkes-Orr University struggles to re-establish for itself some sense of a coherent identity. A stunning new campus is proposed, a radical restructure is mooted. While some push for change, others yearn for the freedom of the university’s ’Golden Age’.
Dangerous Things traces the fortunes of three characters during three years of turmoil in the now middle-aged Sparkes-Orr University. Li-Li is a student working her very original path through the Bachelor of Arts; Godwin is an Englishman downunder, juggling an old-school passion for the Enlightenment with postmodern romantic entanglements; and Alain is a professor of philosophy trapped in the leadership of their dysfunctional faculty.
Dangerous Things is a novel about ideas – big ideas, novel ideas, old ideas and ideas that seem to defy reason – at the heart of which is the individual’s journey to understanding.
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Veritas omnia vincit
Right from the beginning, Sparkes-Orr was different. It began with the name. The Appellation Committee of the new university spent weeks mulling over the list of colonial administrators, political luminaries, social reformers and cultural legends from a less demanding age. They considered the pedigree of each against the name recognition, they considered the name recognition against the potential for posthumous scandal, they considered the name as a design element in a logo that would be sharp and contemporary, while still suggesting prestige.
Then they gave up. Why, they asked, should a university be named after an historical figure whose claim to fame had nothing to do with the arts or the sciences, nothing at all to do with universities? For what, after all, was a university?
For the great Cardinal Newman, the function of a university was intellectual culture, its purpose to educate the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it. The members of the committee held fast to the idea of a university, too, though they may have expressed it in less definitive language, and perhaps it was a slightly different idea. But they did have an idea and they sensed the gulf opening up between the idea of a university and the task they’d been handed of naming one. It was not as though they were naming a suburb somewhere or a council car park.
So they tore up the list they’d been given and began one of their own. They put scientists on it now – scientists and historians, a literature professor, a linguist, and a celebrated anthropologist. They were gasps of delight at their own audacity when they rounded off their list with the name of a controversial philosopher. No-one said so at the time, but they knew what this could mean – the opportunity to strike a blow against the pervasive anti-intellectualism of Australian culture. After another day’s deliberation, they were unanimous. They would moisten the brow of the fledgling institution with the name of not one, but two eminent scholars, Professors Julius Sparkes and Madeline Orr.
Julius Sparkes was a product of establishment culture. At the Grammar, he had been captain of the rowing eight, at Balliol College, a Rhodes Scholar. There, it was rumoured, he had once thrashed the son of a duke over a slight, but the professor never seemed to remember the incident. After Oxford, there were research positions back home, a senior lectureship, and a developing reputation for imaginative thinking. At forty, when he was made a full professor, Julius Sparkes was on the cusp of international fame.
Madeline Orr was the daughter of an accountant. She was so striking, it was said, that offers of marriage showered on her like confetti at a country wedding. Yet she declined them all to pursue a career in science. Her diary records the constant lamentations of her widowed father over the dreadful mistake he felt she was making. Surely it was madness, he said, that a girl who could hold the world in the palm of her exquisite hand, would choose instead to spend her days and nights in a laboratory hiding her fair looks behind ill-fitting goggles and a white coat. Marriage into a merchant dynasty or a prestigious family of lawyers had been there for the taking, and she’d rejected them all. So it was a pity, Madeleine Orr wrote later, that her father had not lived long enough to see her triumph, that he had not been there when her moment in the sun came.
Sparkes and Orr were a team. Their research on how orthomyxoviruses interacted with the immune system would never have made them household names, if it weren’t for that day in 1954 when they carried off the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Overnight, they rose from the obscurity of medical research to national celebrity. Everyone remembered the photograph on the front page of the national papers, that photograph of an engaging couple in a thrilling embrace, his arms tightly around her waist, her arms clasping his muscular shoulders. ‘They looked like lovers!’ people said.
Years later, when Madeline Orr published her autobiography, the truth was revealed. They had been lovers ‘forever’, she announced, lovers long before Sparkes’ wife, Emily, had set off on her own romantic adventure with a postgraduate student, a scandalous but convenient development, that enabled her husband to divorce, and the two scientists to marry. Orr’s revelation added a certain piquancy to their narrative for the younger generation, flavouring the legend of heroic science with a dash of l’amour risqué.
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linzi murrie 