"Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon is a historical fiction novel that follows the lives and adventures of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the surveyors who marked the famous Mason-Dixon line in the 1760s. The novel is written in a unique Olde Style of writing, blending digressive sentences and stories within stories to capture the clash of reason and the supernatural during the Enlightenment era. Despite being a work of historical fiction, the book delves into themes of friendship, freedom, and the complexities of human relationships, all while incorporating elements of humor and intellectual depth.

Characters:

The characters are well-developed and relatable, with a focus on their friendship amidst a backdrop of historical tumult and surreal adventures.

Writing/Prose:

The writing style features elaborate, period-appropriate language that blends historical authenticity with comedic inventiveness, making for a complex yet rewarding read.

Plot/Storyline:

The narrative focuses on the journey of the two surveyors, intertwining historical events and surreal experiences, exploring themes like friendship and the complexities of early American society.

Setting:

The setting encompasses various locations significant to the American colonial experience, blending historical fact with fictionalized elements to explore identity and discovery.

Pacing:

The pacing varies throughout the novel, featuring both intense moments of humor and stretches of complex exposition that may challenge the reader's stamina.

Bay, Mr. Delver Warp and the Brothers Vowtay, coming home from Bengal non-Nabobickal as when they went out, with only enough in their pockets to draw the interest of Cape Belles, who are far less part...

Notes:

Mason & Dixon is a historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997.

The story revolves around the actual historical figures Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who surveyed the Mason-Dixon line in colonial America.

Pynchon incorporates a variety of fantastical elements, including talking animals and supernatural occurrences, into the narrative.

The book features a mix of comedy, adventure, and a deep exploration of themes such as friendship, colonialism, and slavery.

Pynchon wrote the novel using a faux 18th-century style, complete with archaic language and peculiar capitalization.

The narrative is presented by Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who recounts the adventures to an audience in a whimsical manner.

Key events include the survey of the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, significant in the history of America.

The book also addresses real historical events, such as the reformation of the calendar that led to the loss of 11 days.

Humor plays a significant role, with absurd scenarios like a mechanical duck and mystical creatures throughout.

Despite its challenging prose, many readers find it rewarding and emotionally resonant, especially towards the end.

Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings

Content warnings for Mason & Dixon include themes of slavery, colonialism, and the historical violence of that period, which might be sensitive for some readers.

From The Publisher:

A Time magazine and New York Times Best Book of the Year

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as reimagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, major caffeine abuse.

Unreflectively entangled in crimes of demarcation, Mason and Dixon take us along on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revolutionary America and back to England, into the shadowy yet redemptive turns of their later lives, through incongruities in conscience, parallaxes of personality, tales of questionable altitude told and intimated by voices clamoring not to be lost.

Along the way they encounter a plentiful cast of characters, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Samuel Johnson, as well as a Chinese feng shui master, a Swedish irredentist, a talking dog, and a robot duck. The quarrelsome, daring, mismatched pair-Mason as melancholy and Gothic as Dixon is cheerful and pre-Romantic-pursues a linear narrative of irregular lives, observing, and managing to participate in the many occasions of madness presented them by the Age of Reason.

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About the Author:

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V.; The Crying of Lot 49; Gravity's Rainbow; Slow Learner, a collection of short stories; Vineland; Mason & Dixon; Against the Day; and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

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Mason & Dixon

Thomas Pynchon