Mason and Dixon. Or — The Zeugma Infested Lovecraft.

“Snowballs have flown their arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware, — the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking’d-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel’d Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar, — the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax’d and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy December, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults.”

And so opens Thomas Pynchon’s remarkable, mind-boggling, beautiful masterpiece ‘Mason and Dixon’ where, like an inverted ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, projectiles have escaped their death bound fates, being led not into oblivion but into joy. Unlike the rocket these snowballs have escaped the Zero. And Pynchon writes all this pastiching both 18th century and modern speech (at one point a character has a “coprophagic smirk upon his countenance.” i.e. a shit-eating grin).

So what’s it about? The story of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon is told one Philadelphian Christmastide in 1781 by the Rev’d Wicks Cherrycoke, who had accompanied the two astronomer surveyors on their enterprise. Members of his extended family, whom he is visiting, listen with rapt attention.

Charles Mason, the melancholy assistant to the Astronomer Royal, and Jeremiah Dixon, a cheery Geordie surveyor, are commissioned by The Royal Society to travel to Sumatra to take observations of the Transit of Venus. Many measurements of the transit were to take place across the entire Globe and from these precise calculations of Solar Parallax it would then be possible to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It was a scientific project on a vast scale, the 18th Century’s equivalent of searching for Higgs-Boson.

However, after a scuffle with the French at sea, they stop at Cape Town and take their observations there.

From their success with the Transit, and also possibly the result of a ploy by Nevil Maskelyne to prevent Mason from becoming the next Royal Astronomer, he and Dixon are commissioned to travel to America and delineate a line of demarcation between Pennsylvania and Maryland. By observing the stars and pulling down the infinite exactitude of stellar precision they are to construct a line of unassailable accuracy.

And so they travel to America and, with an ever expanding group of axmen, cooks, hangers on, entertainers and all kinds of characters, begin to cut the line into the unknown expanse of that great land mass. As they do so they see a new age of reason coming into being with advanced technologies and inventions helping mould this young nation. But this is also countered with the atrocities all this was paid with. The Paxton Boy’s massacre of Native Americans at Lancaster has a particularly shocking effect on them both, whilst as the line extends westward so they encounter more events both wondrous and terrible.

But are Mason and Dixon being controlled by higher powers? What will be the consequences of cutting this line through lands that are not theirs, lands stained with the blood of innocents? Is the line itself a conduit for evil? Will they receive fame and fortune or is their almost obsessive desire to carry on a sign of them escaping something they dare not mention? And what will, ultimately, return mean for the both of them.

So it’s a highly researched and historically accurate true story…

… except into this Pynchon throws in such wonders as: the Learned English Dog, a Norfolk Terrier which speaks with elaborate erudition and is most certainly an ancestor of Pugnax; Zepho Bark the Werebeaver; monstrous cheeses expanded by eight dimensions; Mrs Eggslap; a golem; Popeye and Mr Spock; a Sino-Jesuit conjunction with an Army of Dark Engineers who run the World, and a robotic duck in which exiled French Chef Armand Allegre embarks on a recollection of what brought him from Paris to America. His tale is dubbed ‘The Iliad of Inconvenience’.

And all the above is just the tip of the wonderful silliness going on here. On top of all that you also have the usual Pynchonisms: a vessel called The Inconvenience; Inherent Vice; a member of the Bodine family, magenta and green (those often observ’d colours incidentally), a hole in the north of the planet allowing access to the hollow interior. Even the vast, globe-spanning secret communication network set up by the Jesuits, for some typically nefarious reason, is a call-back to the hidden postal service Trystero in ‘The Crying of Lot 49’. You also have his cinematic devices so there are hard cuts, visual gags and filmic edits. Even Mason and Dixon yo-yo up and down the line like his contemporary characters did on the subway in ‘V’.

But one of the most striking aspects is the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Pynchon for as Mason and Dixon travel further into the interior there are great, unnamble tentacled beings in the vast American landscape. Vast, dark forces always just beyond the edge of sight lurk potentially everywhere and by measuring the stars and translating them to the surface of the Earth have they pulled something out from the depths of space and inscribed its signature on the surface of our planet? And what are those large mounds as they push deeper into the American wilderness? Huge telluric batteries constructed by Ancients to harness the power of the forces that flow through the Earth or are they a sequence of units of a vast weapon, a weapon made before memory and designed to keep something out of the void, something unnameable? And does the line have that same power? According to a Chinese Captain that joins the party, they are scarring the Earth and, hence, interrupting the flow of its Chi, so maybe.

As a passage from the book says -

“South Mountain is the last concentration of Apparitions,- as you might say, Shape-Morphers, and Soul-Snatchers, besides plain ‘Ghosts.’ Beyond lies Wilderness, where quite another Presence reigns, undifferentiate,- Thatwhichever precedeth Ghostliness…

Dixon takes to wearing a coonskin cap. Mason is alarm’d,- “That something has happen’d to your hair,” is what he says aloud, whilst thinking, that Dixon has become a Werewolf, or even worse — some New World Creature without a name, at home among the illimitable possibilities of Evil in the Forest… some Manifestation to daylight denied…”

The end result, the dizzying cumulative effect, is that ‘Mason and Dixon’ soars at a ridiculously ambitious level. It is epic but isn’t sprawling; it is pulsing with too much effortless rigour for that. And amongst the attacks on the primary targets of Pynchon’s outrage — the horrors of Empire, Colonialism and slavery - are moments of deep humanity and beauty.

It is a book of beauty, wonder, awe and love.