Propinquity

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.