Mason & Dixon
Thomas Pynchon
Books should transport you, challenge you, make you see the world with new eyes, make you live in a new way, make you laugh from the gut, befuddle and charm you… Mason & Dixon does all these things. Plus, it has a talking dog, a possessed mechanical duck, and a marijuana smoking George Washington. Mason and Dixon is not an easy book, but why have easy when you can have extraordinary? Or—to put it another way—why coast along unchallenged in this quotidian life, when Thomas Pynchon’s consciousness-expanding prose is there for the taking?
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 re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political and major caffeine abuse.
We follow the mismatch'd pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope, to pre-Revoluntionary America and back, through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.
