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Propinquity (novel)Propinquity is a 1986 novel by Australian author/journalist John Macgregor. The manuscript won the Adelaide Festival Biennial Award for Literature; the novel was short-listed for The Age Book of the Year. Its author was compared by critics with PG Wodehouse, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Umberto Eco, and Australian Nobellist Patrick White. Despite its critical success, the collapse of the original publisher meant that Propinquity did not reach a wide audience, although in 2013 it was released on Amazon as a Kindle e-book and a CreateSpace print-on-demand paperback.

'Propinquity describes a group of Oxford medical undergraduates trying to bring a medieval English queen - buried deep under Westminster Abbey - back to life. In reviving her, the students intend to expose a 2,000-year-old conspiracy by the Church to repress gnosis - the experiential core of spiritual teaching - to maintain its political power.

The attempt is led by a male Oxford medical student and the daughter of the Dean of Westminster, a medieval scholar, who had seen her father visit the secret tomb as a child, and later recalled the memories.

Plot
Propinquity begins in the 1970s at Geelong Grammar School, with central character and narrator Clive Lean and his friends surreptitiously smoking cigarettes, and contemplating their "maddening" girl-less existence, beside a small bay near the school. The friends end up together at Melbourne University, until Clive's wealthy father dies on the golf course - bequeathing him the family plastics business. Clive is not a success as a businessman, and within two years he is forced to sell Plas-E-Quip to a tramp in the Botanical Gardens, in a bid to evade back taxes. He flees the country.

At Oxford University � where he enrolls to complete his medical degree � he falls in with a second group of friends, and on a trip to London meets Samantha "Sam" Goode, daughter of the Dean Of Westminster Abbey and a medieval scholar. As they draw closer to each other, Sam begins to drop hints about the Abbey's housing ancient secrets. She soon she reveals that beneath the floor in the Chapel of Henry VII lies the body of Berengaria of Navarre, widow of Richard Lionheart.

An intrepid soul, Berengaria had been a follower of the Indian mystic Kabir, who had taught gnosis - the direct connection with the divine, which did away with religion, priests and even belief. On her return to London, Berengaria met the monks at Westminster, who had kept the flame of gnosis alive for twelve centuries. The Westminster monks had originally been initiated by Joseph of Arimathea, the provider of Jesus's tomb, who had travelled to Britain after the crucifixion. A reading of one of Berengaria's letters � entombed underground with her � leads Sam to the startling conclusion that the queen is not dead, but in a trance induced by a medieval herb.

When they learn there is an herbal antidote, but that it no longer grows in Africa, Clive travels to Haiti, where he hopes the herb may have been brought by African slaves. Here he teams up with his old school and university friend Alistair - now a revolutionary fighting "Baby Doc" Duvalier's government � in search of the elusive antidote. Clive eventually purloins it from a witchdoctor. Back in London, the visits by Clive and Sam to Berengaria's underground tomb have been discovered by the Dean, and the group's efforts face ruin.

Now their task is to remove the body from the grasp of the Church, enabling them to revive Berengaria. Several of the group create loud distractions in other parts of the Abbey as Clive goes underground and grabs Berengaria's body. The queen is revived with the antidote herb at a secret workroom, and they spirit her out of the country. The group arrives in Mullumbimby in rural Australia, where Lake - Clive's best friend from school - now lives. They stay in his house. Despite Clive's reviving her from eight centuries of sleep, Berengeria does not appear to take to him. A protracted longueur ensues, as the two try, and fail, to communicate.

On a shopping trip to nearby Byron Bay, Clive is spotted by a policeman and arrested. He is extradited to Melbourne, where he faces charges of tax evasion. In jail he meets the tramp to whom he had sold his company, and bribes him to give favorable evidence; he is acquitted. Meanwhile, the Church has been announcing that the kidnap of Berengaria never occurred. On the courtroom steps, Clive confirms the claim: saying that there had never been a body under Westminster Abbey, and that the "kidnap" had been a hoax arising from a student bet. After the trial, Sam reveals she has been given Berengaria's gnosis, and discusses its revelatory qualities with Clive. He shows an interest in learning it. He also tells Sam that he loves her, and wants to settle down with her and have children. She laughs, replying, "I don't think you could breed in captivity".

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