Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were British astronomers and surveyors, most famous for journeying to North America to resolve the boundary dispute between British colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Their work took four years - from 1763 to 1767 - and the result became known as the Mason-Dixon line, which today stands as the cultural boundary between the northern and southern American states. The duo inspired the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to write this novel, which in turn inspired Mark Knopfler to write one of hist best known songs, the beautiful Sailing to Philadelphia.To summarize this rolllicking and picaresque novel about two surveyors in pre-revolutionary America is a pointless task; unlike the Mason-Dixon line it is occupied with defying boundaries, and exploring contrasts. It is certainly a remarkable book, deserving attention for its prose alone: it is written entirely in a style which borrows works written in the 18th century, and yet remains uniquely its own; strange spelling variants and everpresent capitalization abound in its long and dense sentences, each meliticulously crafted with great attention - enormous effort went into writing this one, and it's difficult to resist mimicking it in personal correspondence. It's really a joy to read on textual level alone - to see the words, the way they're written and the sentences they form, and how the sentences combine to form a narrative.Although the novel begins with Mason's and Dixon's voyage to the Cape Colony in South Africa, where they observe the transfer of Venus - and in the meantime encounter a talking Norfolk terrier, who calls himself "The Learned English Dog" (and is a character whom I felt was grossly underused) and the Cape family of Vrooms, which seems to be composed entirely of nymphomaniacs - it is not until their arrival in colonial America where the reader is exposed to a galore of, well, everything. The novel itself is like a new and yet unexplored country: untamed and wild with danger, but rich with promise and opportunity. The reader becomes an explorer of this land: he has to create a map of a narrative to serve as a guide through the wilderness of ideas.Mason & Dixon explores dualism and dualities, and its ideas are like hot and cold currents. Each idea and theme is accompanied with an opposite, and the novel is focused on exploration of boundaries between them: how such boundaries come into being, how they are crossed and how the two different entities mix with one another, and how the boundaries which held them separate eventually disappear - and what is the result of all this. The still present elements of the mystic are contrasted with the age of reason and enlightement; melancholic and meditative Mason is contrasted with jovial and euphoric Dixon, and like Laurel and Hardy or Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa they venture to explore the weird frontier of America, where they meet a selection of historical characters, which at the time were not famous - but in history they will be: Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, who enjoys being accompanied by women of suspicious reputation and entertains his guests with conversation; George Washington of Virginia, who is partial to smoking hemp and munching on cookies baked by his wife, Martha, and enjoys being entertained by Gershom, his wisecracking slave servant; Thomas Jefferson is in the right place to overhear Dixon's toast to the "pursuit of happiness", and ask if he might borrow it. The colonies are contrasted with a nation at the height of its imperial powers - growing differences in ways of thinking and hostility to the governing power will lead to a war, and eventually gain them independence. Jefferson, Washington and Franklin, among others, will form a nation of their own - one where all men are created equal, and can enjoy life, liberty and pursue their happiness, and view the destiny of their nation to spread these values beyond the thirteen colonies, from coast to coast. These noble ideas are in turn contrasted with reality and the way they're implemented - the effective theft of a continent from its native inhabitans - forced removals, killing and disregard for their life and happiness. How can it be the land of the free where all men are created equal, when its liberty and prosperity will be built with the hands of enslaved people, captured and brought there from another continent? The work of Mason and Dixon - the physical definition of boundaries in America - is at the same time an act of creation and division of the country; as the boundary between the frontier and civilization shrinks, one of the characters remarks that "Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a line". These words prove to be prophetic, as it the Mason-Dixon line will serve as a division between the North and South, and will split the infant nation in two and catapult it into the bloody civil war. The Mason-Dixon line can be seen as the symbolic line that started the uncountable dividing lines which put boundaries across America; the line of income inequality, of racial division and fear - turning the grand Cities into a dangerous frontier populated by various minorities, and forcing white settlers to flee to the safety of the suburbs.The unsung hero of this tale is the reverend Wicks Cherrycoke (Ha Ha! Get it?), who is the narrator of the novel and tells the story of Mason and Dixon to his family in Philadelphia, in 1786 - 21 years after they finished their line. The narration, too, is dualistic - the narrated events take place before the American Revolution, and there is an enormous sense of it brewing - but are narrated from a perspective of ten years after the event. The book both anticipates the Revolution - and contemplates upon it.Cherrycoke is a clergyman of questionable theology and a shameless moocher, sponging off his relatives who agreed to let him stay with them as long as he keeps their children entertained - if he won't perform then out with him to the streets ruled by harsh Philadelphia winter! Reverend Cherrycoke tells his tales to the twins, Pitt and Pliny - as it could not be agreed which one was born first, so each got a choice to be called "Elder" or "Younger" - who have heard him spin yarns about the faraway Indies and the faraway land of Hottentots, and request a tale about America. Cherrycoke claims to have met Mason and Dixon and accompanied them on a number of occasions, and tells the twins their story - which he liberally spices up with a heavy dose of invention, often describing events he couldn't have seen and people he has never met. Since his staying in the warm Philadelphia home depends completely on satisfaction of his listeners, Cherrycoke often changes his story according to their demands; jumping from one character to the other, using more action and fantastical elements to satisfy the boys - including a nod to the Canadian poet James McIntyre and a dramatization of his Ode on the Mammoth Cheese, stories of an amorous mechanical duck (which was based on a real invention - Jacques de Vaucanson's The enormous lenght and many, many tangents of Mason and Dixon might discourage many readers, it remains highly readable and will benefit from revisiting. Although the honor of being Thomas Pynchon's best book is commonly bestowed upon Gravity's Rainbow, I would argue that Mason & Dixon is an equal, if not better, candidate for the title. It's an ambitious epic which is a show of satire and farce and mixes the fantastic with the historic to great results, filled with countless puns and jokes, with characters randombly breaking into bawdy songs. With all that, it is also a work of melancholy: ruminations on the lost influence of mysticism and religion - and imagination as well. The loss of the final frontier and man's conquer of the beauty of wilderness and is subsequent replacement with contemporary civilization - endless streams of condos, parking lots and shopping malls. In a country found on unity and cooperation, Red and Blue powers take sway over land and people, each trying to grasp more than the other. But all this is seems like just a background to a simple story: one of two unlikely friends going on an adventure. The growing warmth between Mason and Dixon and the bond they form is presented with genuine affection and they become real, and so do their hopes, feelings and dreams, provoking genuine emotions. The final chapters, where we see them for one last time in their old age, are particularly touching.I don't think that any review could do this novel true justice: there are simply too many ideas, themes, gags and jokes that academic essays could be written on it - and were. As for me, I can only give 5 stars for the novel and 5 stars for the novelist who had the balls to write it, first thinking of it in 1975 and finally publishing it in 1997, when he turned 60. Approach without fear: there is much to be found and savored here, and time spent on reading it is definitely time not lost.
[5.8/6] … It was that wonderful, so much more than any other book I've read in I can't remember how long. Though not without a human amount of imperfections.I hadn't read Pynchon before, and this isn't the usual place to start. However (i) I'd loved the sound of this book ever since I saw press reviews for it, and I got a copy not long after it was released in paperback. (Yup, I – and various removal men – have been carting the thing around for fifteen years. And by god it was worth it. The opening pages are as magical a beginning as any I can think of, as good as Bleak House, and every time I thought of getting rid of the book I'd look at them and knew it absolutely had to stay. Besides, I'm ever so glad I've got this cover of lovely antique ampersands, and not the headache-inducing bastard which is now the default for the same ISBN. )However (ii) If you're comfortable with eighteenth century British and a bit of American history, with reading the accent and dialect of north-east England, and have a smattering or more of knowledge about geography, astronomy, as well as * whisper* superstitious esoterica like feng shui and astrology, it might well be the right place to start. (I've read a few quotes from Bleeding Edge and seeing the author of this marvel writing about hipsters' jeans and how difficult it is to find your way out of Ikea, my heart sinks... Yup, M&D probably was the right book for me. Also, I disagree about the Ikea thing: it's simply a matter of ignoring the stuff on sale, and if you want to be even quicker, ignoring the designated routes and keeping moving.)I find it easy to get disillusioned with present-day settings, but go far enough back with historical fiction and I start picking holes in it too. A book like Jim Crace's Harvest deftly sidesteps us pedants with a vaguely timeless setting and details from different eras; the amazing Mason & Dixon goes several better with meticulous arcana of its time and a proliferation of postmodern, knowing and quite often funny deliberate anachronisms. And in so doing, it's also terribly, terribly eighteenth century. The Pynchon blend of science and hippiedom suits the times perfectly too, the era of Religion and the Decline of Magic where one man could be both a mathematician and a rural wizard.From that very conceptual level right down to a plethora of puns erudite and/ or filthy Pynchon is a master of layered recursion. (Why did no-one ever say to me, 'With that username, I bet you'd love Pynchon'? He generates the sort of wordplay once every goddamn page that these days, especially without someone to bounce off, I feel lucky to think of a few times a year.)Ideas of modern and postmodern are just indications of popularity, not first occurrence: the very first novels were full of them and the eighteenth century could be postmodern and dirty-minded in a way that feels far more contemporary than the Victorians. (This is probably why I've always thought III works best out of all the Blackadder series. Though it doesn't hurt that the costumes of the era were so good they even managed to make Rowan Atkinson look slightly attractive.)Even after a week to settle, I still just want to say about Mason & Dixon, “it's so everything. Wise and funny and moving yadda yadda yadda and all those adjectives cover quotes use. But this one really is. A great big exhilarating book that gives you the feeling of having lived the span of a life – two very interesting lives lived over three continents – and with much joy and fun and interestingness as well as terrible things witnessed all over the world. There's even room for pets. Most of all, it's an epic friendship with a warmth that initially surprised, found amid lots of left-brain cleverness and odd bursts of Carry On humour. Something that brought to mind the glow associated with those very few people who, almost as soon as your first conversation started, finding so much understanding yet a world's worth of contrast, you felt you didn't ever want to stop and you knew you wanted them around somewhere or other for the rest of your life. It was always exciting to pick up and read Mason & Dixon; some days I read a bit less but I never needed to space a short book in the middle. Nothing else would be as good, I was sure of it. (And in this project of reading some of the 1001 books I already own, I'm finding that not a lot of modern classics contain so much joy and fun as this one.)But whatever could be wrong with this formidable feat of literature? Really not much at all. Getting near the end of part II some long stories-within-a-story were taking the piss a bit. Though one of those was the second time in a month I'd read a re-telling of the Lambton Worm (previously in Alice in Sunderland, which I thought told it better). Also a Sadeian yet picturesque detail from a serial in a scandalous magazine - this was another of my odd more-than-one-gender responses, for a while from an outside view I found it quite erotic and then later had a female-bodied response in which I was left me with the woman's equivalent of when a man, seeing a scene in which a protagonist gets kicked (or worse) in the balls, grimaces and cringes, and part of me was dissatisfied with the absence of mention of pain and its effects in the text. But, bah, such a tiny tiny fraction of the book, a book which is very humane about the abuses of its times – useful for that having a hero who's a Quaker! And one which I might hazard had something to do with the generation of steampunk, shortly before it came to be called steampunk let alone the proliferation of names for its equivalent in other centuries: fantastical machinery (Vaucanson's mechanical duck takes flight, and more), and a scene in which one of our heroes decides to go a bit superhero which made me look up the publication date of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - a few years later. I started off thinking the whole thing was “very 90's”: the musical numbers, the fantasy sequences, just like some of the great American TV series were doing at the time. But nope, I read more background: this is just Pynchon, he'd been doing that for aaaages. (The size and detail of the book also reminded me of a recent interview with Eleanor Catton in which she said the 21st century trend for doorstop novels was the book equivalent of the rise of the TV series box set.)Yes, reading background. It does need notes and a dictionary. Quiet countryside is a pretty good place to read a great big cosy attention-devouring novel (even if its framing device is set in Advent, whilst there are so many swifts, swallows and house martins wheeling above you it's almost like being divebombed). But if you've got no dictionary, a Kindle with no charge and no cable, and mobile broadband of a speed that would make anyone long for a modem from the year of this book's publication, then you just have to make do with not looking up every weird word. There are a few sets of notes kicking around the internet which I managed to have a look at. Most of them were pretty unsatisfactory if you have a little relevant knowledge, not telling me many of the things I did want to know, so I'd given up on them by about p.100. By far the best was the Pynchon wiki, which I stuck with, though too many of the later entries are just intros and links to wikipedia entries without succinct explanation – would have been more interesting with a connection fast enough for all the click throughs - and glossing of words that you'd surely know already if you're reading a book like this (e.g. 'ubiquitous'). I've got a few extra bits and pieces I might email them once I have better internet and if I remember. In the meantime, in shorthand: p.390, Scarlet Pimpernel; that was probably my best spot. (Sorry, I probably sound a bit up m'self in this post; guess I'm just proud to have finished this book when I'd long thought I might never be up to it again.)This was just such a wonderful book and if you think you might be relatively comfortable enough with the subjects (I know I'd have found it too much hard work if it was about a subject I knew very little of) then I would very very much recommend it. And I've no doubt it will reward re-reading too...
What do You think about Mason And Dixon (2004)?
Hay que empezar diciendo que ninguna reseña puede abarcar todo lo que Pynchon nos relata en su novela. No es una lectura fácil, pero es uno de los libros más asequibles de Pynchon. Creo que su autor no pretendía escribir una novela histórica al uso. Aunque conociendo al autor, ya esperaba algo similar. Haciendo uso de diálogos y pensamientos, Pynchon nos dibuja unos personajes que rozan la caricatura, o más bien el homenaje, parejas tan memorables como Don Quijote y Sancho Panza o Gargantúa y Pantagruel.’Mason y Dixon’ es la historia que el reverendo Wicks Cherrycoke narra a su auditorio, conformado por niños y adultos, que se sitúan a su alrededor. Como si de Sherezade en ‘Las mil y una noches’ se tratase, el reverendo Cherrycoke centra su mirada en este par de personajes, a los que acompañó en parte de sus viajes. También hay que puntualizar que el reverendo no es un narrador demasiado fiable, como muy bien él mismo se encarga de recordarnos al principio. Y es que la historia no adolece de elementos fantásticos, como perros que hablan o golems.Mason, astrónomo, y Dixon, agrimensor, fueron dos personas que existieron realmente. Su mayor hazaña, por la que están en los libros de Historia, es la que abarca la mayor parte de la novela: en la última mitad del siglo XVIII, trazaron una línea divisora entre las tierras del estado de Pennsylvania y las tierras de Maryland, con Delaware de por medio. En realidad, el libro puede dividirse en dos partes, una primera parte que transcurre en Sudáfrica, donde se asientas los cimientos de la relación de ambos protagonistas; y una segunda parte, donde se cuenta lo antes mencionado.Quien se acerque a ’Mason y Dixon’ no va a encontrar una novela de aventuras, donde prime la épica, o quizás no la épica que se pueda esperar de tal término. Pynchon ha trazado todo un monumento literario, de conocimientos enciclopédicos, más de diálogos y pensamientos que de hechos, donde los acontecimientos se van produciendo sin descanso.Personalmente, puedo decir que ’Mason y Dixon’ me ha gustado más que la desbordante ‘El arco iris de gravedad’, siendo más comprensible y asequible que esta última. La novela empieza muy bien, te atrapa desde un principio, y te arrastra hasta su ecuador, donde acabas llegando un tanto exhausto. Después, se vuelve una tanto anodina, pero te dejas llevar. Hasta llegar a la última parte del libro, donde la historia remonta, y donde destacan los últimos capítulos, que son brillantes, e incluso melancólicos.
—Oscar
One grows suspicious of his literariness when his opinions differ from those of the established literary community. While most will tell you that Gravity's Rainbow is Pynchon's finest work, I enjoyed M&D the most. The contemporary author shows that he's still got it, more than 20 years after winning the National Book Award with GV. The narrative is much more straightforward, though the language takes some getting used to (it becomes one of the book's strengths though, and I found myself mimicking it in less formal correspondence for years). In the 18th century, Northern European powers were hitting full stride in their quests to colonize the New World and Africa. Great Britain and France would align with various indigenous tribes in the Americas and battle for supremacy there, while the Dutch and English trading companies conquered and profited from their conquests of the East and West Indies. In this context, demarcations and astronomical observations appear to serve purposes other than knowledge. This is where we begin with our two heroes, commissioned to observe an astronomical event from the Dutch colonies in what is now South Africa. The melancholy Mason and the more jovial Dixon make for comic tension immediately as they survive a naval scuffle and the sexual advances of Dutch colonists' bored daughters.The narrative continues to follow the title's characters as they travel to the American colonies to demarcate the line which bears their name. Pynchon's use of imagined worlds, narrative interruptions, and strange characters serve him superbly in this large work. The oft-leveled criticism that he leaves the reader no chance to identify or even sympathize with his characters does not apply here. There are touching scenes when Mason imagines his late wife communicating with him, and when he remembers his sons who have stayed behind in England. The warmth that does eventually grow between he and Dixon will cause the reader to remember the friends he has and remember that he should call them instead of spending all his time reading 800 page books. This one's worth it, though.
—Ben
In the search for the mythical "Great American Novel", too many are guilty of forming their idea of what this should be before reading any of the contending texts. Hence, the likes of Don De Lillo, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike are those most often mentioned in this context. The assumption is that the beast should deal with twentieth century material - the America of skyscrapers, mass immigration, tenement buildings and baseball. However, what better way of getting to the soul of a country than an exploration of the initial conditions at that nation's birth? Thomas Pynchon obviously agreed and came up with a kaleidoscopic overview of America in the womb. Over 700 pages of the most impressive prose imaginable, Pynchon takes us on a tour of eighteenth century America, with doses of South Africa, the UK and St. Helena thrown in. But this isn't just an academic exercise designed to create dazzling prose, this is a touching novel with larger than life characters and a big heart - a human novel that emphasizes decency, open-mindedness and human frailty.
—Rob
