“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.”

Mason & Dixon is justified madness. A book that cares little for convention, and is an experience that is unique and memorable. It’s mostly challenging due to Pynchon emulating 18th century English, but also because it delves into astronomical jargon, and requires some knowledge of British and American history.

In the 1760’s, before the American Revolution, an astronomer named Charles Mason, and a surveyor named Jeremiah Dixon, head to British America to survey a number of areas that would eventually become the Mason-Dixon Line, forming the borders of Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Delaware.

There’s plenty of silly jokes, poems, and songs, and Pynchon frequently pays homage to historical figures and key events in American History.

So many subplots. Not all of them work.
New characters are introduced, only to be forgotten again. At one point, an antagonist in the form of an evil Jesuit is introduced only to be ditched unceremoniously some time later. Oh, and there’s also a talking dog.

Pynchon’s wild tangents and zany antics make one feel a little lost and confused. I suppose it’s all a part of the experience (Despite my initial thoughts, it’s actually easier than Gravity’s Rainbow).

It took the writer over 20 years to finish and finally publish and it shows. The book is rich in detail. From the bizarre social gatherings of public hangings, to the wind-swept insanity-inducing island of St Helena, and to George Washington having a fondness of getting high, “Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!”, I learnt a great deal of amusing, historical trivialities.

Mason and Dixon are fine characters but at times they feel under-utilised. This seems to be a signature of Pynchon. It’s all about the use of language. This is something to remember when attempting any of his novels.

There are a few notable chapters, such as when they express their abhorrence for slavery around the world, and a deep insight into bereavement that are truly impactful. I just wish there were more passionate moments like these. I suppose they wouldn’t be so moving if they were more frequent.

However, the last hundred pages are surprisingly poignant regarding the relationship between the two characters, what they went through, and the legacy they left behind. All of the previous complaints I had were washed away. Everything came together quite beautifully.

I always felt I was reading something special but the ending swept me off my feet. Despite being tough at times, Mason & Dixon is an extraordinary adventure, one I wholeheartedly recommend.

“...so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats.”

Pynchon ranked:

Gravity’s Rainbow (4.2/5)
Mason & Dixon (4.1/5)
The Crying of Lot 49 (3.7/5)
Slow Learner (3.2/5)

FINISHED!!! I am VICTORIOUS! Despite the ridiculous length of time that it took me to finish this, I really enjoyed it. It was strange, wacky, funny, confusing, brilliant, and in the end there was a perfect mix of nostalgia, sadness, and grief.

The only thing that I would really recommend is to not read it on a schedule. Do it when you're not watching a clock or trying desperately to finish. It's a book that should be explored rather than read. Unfortunately I focused on just continuing to turn the pages and keep reading and I think the experience suffered for it.

But it was still a really great experience :) I was hoping for a bit more info on the actual Mason-Dixon line but it was more about the partnership of the two men.

pynchon's _mason & dixon_ is ostensibly a historical fiction about the astronomer and land surveyor (respectively) commissioned to draw the now-eponymous line between pennsylvania and maryland.

as mason and dixon's line signifies distinctions of far greater import than simple political geography (north/south, slavery/abolition), so pynchon's tome is at once an epic journey through pre-revolutionary america; a sometimes-didactic People's History on which the hypocrisy of a people who would decry British oversight while visiting far greater atrocities on their native american neighbors is never lost; a degree-of-difficulty=10 meditation on religious and scientific philosophy in the age of reason; a novel about 18th century events written in the style of an 18th century novel; and most important, an examination of the beauty and occasional limitations of male friendship.

where _m&d_ lacks the pitch-black humor and political immediacy of _gravity's rainbow_ it more than compensates with the most beautifully impressionistic, frequently elegiac prose i've ever seen committed to paper. further, where pomo lit generally relies on the "fracturing of self" -- note that the final book of _gr_ ceases to concern itself with "slothrop qua slothrop" [pg. 739, "a counterforce spokesman":], allowing the protagonist to be absorbed by the political movement for which he is a stand-in -- _m&d_ never wavers as a character study of the "melancholick" mason and the jovial outsized bumpkin dixon ["often causing future strangers to remember them as dixon and mason":].

pynchon sets the events of _m&d_ in the crucible of their occurrence, foregoing reliance on "obvious" political events like the stamp act for ones that would really have informed the mindset of his protagonists -- gloucester's weavers' rebellion of 1775 (against the clothiers, over labor price-setting), the jacobite revolt of '45, braddock's defeat at monongahela river, the ascendancy of maskylene to the position of astronomer royal in the aftermath of bradley's death, etc. etc.

like _gr_, _m&d_ is also loaded with science history; i know more about 18th century attempts to solve the apparently-difficult problem of determining longitude at sea (lunar; chronometer), the equatorial coordinate system (declination, right ascension), and the importance of the transits of venus in determining the distance from earth to sun than i ever thought i would. [note: this was mostly my own research, but i found it interesting, relevant and fruitful.]

to address the elephant in the essay: if you read pynchon, you may not read him twice, so i'd probably start with _gr_, but to be completely honest i enjoyed _m&d_ more; neither is even remotely an easy read.

From the vault of James O. Incandenza.

The Fantastical Fractionated by a Freudian Feng Shui: Liaison of Lines. Year of the Character Limit Neural Prosthetic Alert Device. Mixed Martial Arts Eschaton tournament expressing ideological hostilities along lines of rational and romantic interest, taking place in assiduously reconstructed, and still highly flammable, library of Alexandria. w/color commentary from Rev Wicks Cherrycoke (Quantum Superposition of Joe Rogan Deep Within Blackbox Sensory Deprivation Chamber) (Joe Rogan)) and The Human Torch (Johnny Storm (Joe Rogan)); 35mm; running length approximate to the amount of time necessary for a sole victor to emerge; full color w/ visceral olfactory enhancement courtesy of accompanying scratch and sniff anatomical figurine; full sound with live orchestra performing O Fortuna; conducted by Venerabilis Inceptor aka Doctor Invincibilis (Sir William of Ockham). Filmed before a live studio audience consisting of one half loquacious, emotionally incontinent, spoken word poetry addicts and one half, abstraction addled, lugubrious, pure mathematics professors, all armed with climbing pitons, later distributed through samizdat style Zip drives; by former disgruntled employees of the Kellogg’s corporation who were fed up with the myth of breakfast.

*Orchestra commences on signal from gentle bratwurst susurrus*

“O Fortune,
like the moon
you are changeable,
ever waxing
ever waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
playing with mental clarity;
poverty
and power
it melts them like ice.”

Reverend Cherrycoke (Quantum Superposition of Joe Rogan Deep Within Blackbox Sensory Deprivation Chamber) (Joe Rogan)) is wheeled into officiating position by several muscular individuals wearing only executioner hoods and athletic cups (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, Mark William Calaway, Jocko Willink, Gene Lebell (played by David Hasselhoff)). Obsidian sensory deprivation chamber looms. An unsettling obelisk. It’s shadow bifurcating the gladiatorial spectacle.

Pan to melee on library floor. Benjamin Franklin (Stellan John Skarsgård) executes flying arm bar on Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Tim Curry) who is heard above the din to say: “Fye Thee to Timbuktu, Wretched Lech!” Before his arm bends impossibly with a sickening crack. “Break! Break! Break!” Screeching like a grave wight and pantomiming actions with injured arm resembling deboned fish. Nearby, Alexander Pushkin (Hugh Jackman), roars into the fray and discombobulates Walt Whitman (Sean Connery), who he mistook for Karl Marx, (Rubeus Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) (Body Doubled by Martin Bayfield))), with a vicious running lariat to the back of the neck, sending the man sprawling to the Bibliotheca’s floor like a sack of pubic cement. Sensing his mistake, Pushkin (Jackman) veers into housings of ancient papyrus in bizarre act of contrition.

Revered Cherrycoke (QSJRDWBSDC (JR)): If our ontological commitments are to remain commensurate with the progress of scientific reasoning, we must hereby renounce all boundaries as purely arbitrary fictions! For is it not the case that all matter is a result of fluctuations in fields which permeate space like a cosmic mandolin? And we, condensed forms of vibrational virtuosity, represent fixed oscillations of catgut, seemingly discrete, but actually continuous with the whole of the universe’s beautiful melody? Tis only our amplitudes, and only for a short while at that, which peaks here and now. A stubbornly persistent illusion of solidly, wouldn’t you say Mr. Storm?

The Human Torch (Johnny Storm (Joe Rogan): “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned!” Hahahahahaha!

“Fate – monstrous
and empty,
you whirling wheel,
you are malevolent,
well-being is vain
and always fades to nothing,
shadowed
and veiled
you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
to your villainy.”

Wordsworth (Patrick Stewart) and Thomas Jefferson (Mario Lopez) tumble to the ground and engage in a Brazilian Jujitsu chess match, with Wordsworth (Stewart) trying and failing to secure a triangle choke, opting instead for an attempted arm bar. Lopez, with great strength (and arguably an unfair advantage in terms of age and wrestling background) lifts Wordsworth (Stewart) from the floor and slams him violently back down, knocking over a brazier in the process. Hot coals tumbling. Emily Dickson (Maureen Ponderosa (Catherine Reitman)), having been scalded by embers, shouts mysterious invective: “Hooptitously Drangle Me In Crinkly Brundlewurddles!” Losing concentration and receiving a radium enriched spinning back fist from Marie Curie (Ronda Rousey).

Revered Cherrycoke (QSJRDWBSDC (JR)): And so here we are, both discrete and continuous, as we are persuaded most ardently to believe by the mystifying results of the Double Slit Experiments. And yet, do we not consider ourselves a Doric column of stability? Do we not parse our experience as like unto peas and not potatoes of the mashed variety? This systemic error that we commit, a heuristic which delineates the objects of the world with a paucity of percept...

The Human Torch (Johnny Storm (Joe Rogan) using his combustive body to light a duBois starts violent reaction with particulates in the air.

“Fate is against me
in health
and virtue,
driven on
and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour
without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate
strikes down the strong,
everyone weep with me!”

This book is Pynchon making sweet love to the primeval wilderness of America afore the people fully discharged their Cartesian climax across the face of her doe-eyed map in a bukkake-balkanization-sesh. ‘Ole Tom is diving deep into primordial waters with his gooch clenched tightly with eukaryotic enthusiasm, while maintaining, along the taint, a stiff prokaryotic posture. Examining the nature of boundaries and their porousness. This is Pynchon doling out such perfect prose that, if you’re one to ensconce your favorite little ditties in neon mnemonics, will have your book resembling the aftermath of a Crayon Krakatoa. How someone can manage to produce a work of such mirth, mayhem, and melancholy without it collapsing like a failed chimera with an orangutan’s face where its pelvic bowl should be, I can’t begin to say. Though my running theory is that it’s a result of monozygotic magic in which, having reabsorbed the spiritual essence of his potential sibling, Tom was able to bedevil Beelzebub with a twofer and thus gain the square of a normal bargain. Pynchon, in addition to bringing the big dick maximalist energy to his work, is also not afraid to do what is unthinkable to many of the cock diesel chordate phylum who relieve themselves by encephalizing a book until the binding girth is sufficient to delimit the realms of Middle Earth - be entertaining - Tom is nuttier than a fucking mud-bug and nary a bit shy about displays of eroticism so egregious that it has left certain Victorian sexualities so seminally scarred that they’ve took to eating cat food, huffing glue, and chugging beer in ritualized quantities in a sad attempt to regain a cerebral chastity long absconded.

If you enjoy gorgeous writing, then this 18th century/idiosyncratic styled work of genius will wallop you with every page, and would be worth the price of admission just for the prose experience alone. But if you also love absurd humor. Amazing characterization. Deep metaphors entwined with dick jokes. And moving experiences which will stay with you long after you’ve lost control of your bladder. Then, in the immortal words of a stranger who once said to me (after seeing me eating a giant chocolate chip cookie) -

“Buddie, get’che a bite ‘o the middle, ‘ats where it’s at.”

It's constantly awe-inspiring how much mental vitality and agility Pynchon has at his command. Awesome also how extensive and detailed is his research. His immersion in his subject is all-consuming and watertight. It tells the story, in picaresque form, of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the British surveyors and astronomers who mapped out the boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland in colonial America, the line used to divide the North from the South. In the novel Pynchon takes riotous and sometimes hilarious exception to the validity of any kind of boundary - Mason and Dixon share a bond that sometimes reminds one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza - though this boundary, of course, is peppered with violent omens. America is very much a central character in this book, and we get a evocatively convincing and insightful depiction of the country's childhood and how its personality was formed.

The narrator of the novel is the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke sitting with his family around a drawing room fire. More often than not he is recounting incidents he could not possibly know in such detail. Essentially he has virtually no authority to be telling us this story. But this is the lynchpin of Pynchon's jibe at official histories: "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,- who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government."

I loved all the fun he poked at the recounting of history. Having just finished Hamnet with the strong suspicion that O'Farrell's Agnes bears as little similarity in reality to Shakespeare's wife as I do to Eva Braun I was left with the feeling that to write historical fiction about real people you either have to acknowledge your mischief making and make it a weave of the narrative or perform a kind of all-consuming spiritual possession of your subject. Hilary Mantel succeeded at the latter; Pynchon opts for the former and, in this regard, does a fabulous job.

But this book, more difficult to read than anything I've tackled since Finnegan's Wake, was ultimately just a little too bonkers for my taste. So often it resounds beautifully with poetic authenticity but Pynchon being Pynchon we also get an invisible amorous mechanical duck, a talking dog and a talking clock, giant vegetables, a restless golem, conspiracy theory and alien abduction.
At times, brilliant; at other time times, exhausting, like any long tortuous excursion up towards the realms of thinner air.

Just when you are starting to really enjoy Pynchon, there is no more Pynchon to read...

It may be the most beautiful and complex book that I’ve ever read.

First read 15. May - 1. June, 2014.
Reread from 1. July - 14. July, 2018.

This time around the silly puns and references, like Bill Clinton's non-inhaling and whatnot, though funny, took the back-seat to the delightful atmosphere and remarkable writing. This book is a rollicking, fun, and just absolutely refreshingly charming novel. Nevermind all the fun and hilarious puns and situations and ridiculous and fantastical things that occur, not to mention all the historical characters that (obviously and necessarily) appear in historically distorted ways, all of which are hilarious and great and wonderful,-- here, Pynchon evokes smells and images and feelings of coffee, tea, stuffed and smoke-filled pubs and bars filled with various and diverse characters and charlatans and sailors and humans and talking dogs and werewolves and humans-turned-into-aggressive-beavers, winter- and Christmastime, spices and herbs, summer and discovery (reminding one of Ishmael's quote: "As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts")--; the atmosphere of dreary journeys across both the seas and of various landscapes followed by the magical moments of arrival and reprieval before further hardships, described in the greatest prose I have come across as only Pynchon can write,-- a glorious novel about friendship and memory and love and life,-- where the essential undertone appears to be, don’t take any of this seriously because none of us gets out of it alive.
This enchanting novel is the first one that pops into my head when people ask me, “what’s the best book you have ever read?”

------------------------------------------------
Original review from 2014 below:

I am Jeremiah Dixon
I am a Geordie boy
A glass of wine with you, sir
And the ladies I'll enjoy
All Durham and Northumberland
Is measured up by my own hand
It was my fate from birth
To make my mark upon the earth.

He calls me Charlie Mason
A stargazer am I
It seems that I was born to chart the evening sky
They'd cut me out for baking bread
But I had other dreams instead
This baker's boy from the west country
Would join the Royal Society.

I was listening to one of my favourite albums of all time ( Sailing To Philadelphia ) when I got the idea that maybe I should read some more Pynchon. I read Inherent Vice some time ago and found it to be pretty fun. Having recently bought most of his books, I was wondering which one to read next. I wanted to (and still will) wait with Gravity's Rainbow, but the rest of his works were all interesting. Just as I was about to pick out Vineland, I hear the beautiful guitar picking of an F# chord from Mark Knopfler, an Aadd9 (or something like that) and then some sort of E-chord... and then the singing begins -- which is quoted at the top here. And that was that: Mason & Dixon it is!

(After having read about 200 pages, I came across an interview with Knopfler where he talked about this album, and it turns out the song is in fact inspired by the book. For some reason this made me terribly happy...)

The book itself is a tough nut to crack. It's written in the style of the time it's set it: 1761-1786. We follow the melancholic Mason and the life-loving Dixon as they meet up in Portsmouth, journey to see the transit of Venus, and then eventually go to America to draw their line. The book is chock-full of references and allusions -- there is even a reference to Bill Clinton's pot-smoking (but of course not inhaling!), a possible reference to Flowers for Algernon, and a cool little reference (I think) to Ray Charles's song What'd I say. Of course tons more.

It's also filled with odd and often hilarious occurrences. They meet up and smoke marijuana with George Washington; they meet a skirt-chasing Benjamin Franklin; and they meet a talking dog called the Learned English Dog. And then there is some talk of gigantic vegetables and possible giants...? I think. I'm not sure. Oh, and did I mention the mechanical duck that suddenly springs to life and apparently gets supernatural powers and then occasionally terrorises our two heroes?

The book is described on the cover as a "rollicking picaresque tale... playful, erudite and funny." I think that's a pretty succinct way to describe it. It's fun to read, albeit challenging and awfully dense at times.

I also came across this on wikipedia, and thought I could add it to my review:

"John Krewson, writing for The Onion's A. V. Club observed, "Whatever meanings and complex messages may lie hidden in Pynchon's text can, for now, be left to develop subconsciously as the reader enjoys the more immediate rewards of the work of a consummate storyteller. Pynchon is one, and he never quite lets you forget that while this might be an epic story, it's an epic story told to wide-eyed children who are up past their bedtime."

PS: You can hear the song I referred to in the beginning here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrLdK...

PPS, 03.07.2015:

It's been over a year since I read this, and I don't think there are any other books out there that I think of with such fond memories as I do of this one. Retrospectively, I'm tempted to say that this is my all-time favourite book -- trumping even The Brothers Karamazov. The more I think about this book, the more I love it. It helps, of course, that I still love the Knopfler song, and listen to it several times a week. At every listen, it evokes the same feelings as the book did. It's amazing when works of art go hand in hand like that.

n  Bettie's Booksn

Κατέγραφε τα πάντα, κάτι σαν σκιά που βρίσκεται πάντοτε στο δωμάτιο, καταγράφοντας κάθε προφορικό σχόλιο, που αλλιώς θα χανόταν για πάντα μέσα στον δυνατό άνεμο της Λήθης. Καθώς ολόκληρη η πολιτισμένη Βρετανία συναθροίζεται αυτήν την ώρα, πόσες όμορφες εκφράσεις από τον γαλαζοαιματο χαρτοπαίχτη , το θαυμαστή μιας σερβιτόρας , τον προσβεβλημένο δανδή, τον ικανοποιημένο μέθυσο, πετούν στον αέρα, βγαίνουν από την πόρτα και χάνονται για πάντα μέσα στη νύχτα και τη σιωπή
Όλες αυτές οι φωνές.
Γιατί να μην πάρουμε μερικές λέξεις από τα στίφη που ορμούν προς το κενό όπου θα χαθούν για πάντα;

Ο Μέισον και ο Ντίξον, δύο Άγγλοι αστρονόμοι, χαράσσουν το σύνορο ανάμεσα στην Πενσυλβάνια και το Μέριλαντ
Η οδύσσειά τους, το όχημα για έναν ακόμα απολαυστικό και χορταστικό Pynchon
Πολυβόλο γνώσεων κατά ριπάς, με τρομερές ιστορίες για κάτι που αυτοαποκαλείται Αμερική και αποκτά υπόσταση και ωριμάζει σαν καλοκαιρινό κεράσι, με εκπληκτική ταχύτητα

Κ ο Ν χάνεται ξανά μέσα στους γεμάτους νικοτίνη καπνούς που είναι τόσο αδιαφανείς όσο και το μέλλον, και αφήνει τον Μέισον να νιώθει ένοχος και ανόητος, και να μην μπορεί να παρηγορηθεί με την ανάμνηση του χαρούμενου αγοριού που πηγαινοέρχεται σαν σαΐτα, λες και ύφαινε την ομάδα, μέρα με τη μέρα, στη Δύση

[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...


[A later addition. Among the reasons I'd always loved that opening page was that it evoked these lines from Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost), which were also the lyrics to a carol I sang at school one year; it has just been suggested to me that they may be similar enough to be a[n unconscious] hommage, which I'd not dared venture before.]

Further evidence of Pynchon's inimitability: a while back, while I was actually reading this, I had the clever and probably misguided idea in the back of my mind to write a review in Mason & Dixon's own style. I had all the grammatical rules figured out; I'd capitalize every concrete noun, replace every 'ic' with 'ick' (e.g. 'politickal'), and apocopate 'through' into 'thro.' And so on. This seemed like a good idea at the time. When I sat down to finally write the damn thing, though, I couldn't get a single sentence to sound good.

Anyway, Pynchon's paranoia manifests itself here in the twin sciences of astronomy and surveying--two disciplines oriented around drawing invisible lines between otherwise unrelated entities. For what is paranoia but the fear of invisible, unknowable connections between superficially unrelated things?

some Joaks and Lines that I liked:

"The more aware of their Sins as they commit them, the more pleas'd be these Cape folk,-- more so than Englishmen, who tend to perish from the levels of Remorse attending any offense graver than a Leer."

"The year after Rebekah's death was treacherous ground for Mason, who was as apt to cross impulsively by Ferry into the Bosom of Wapping, and another night of joyless low debauchery, as to attend Routs in Chelsea, where nothing was available betwixt Eye-Flirtation, and the Pox."

"Mason, Dixon, and Maskelyne are in a punch house on Cock Hill called "The Moon," sitting like an allegorickal Sculpture titl'd, Awkwardness.

"Emerson's notorious 'therefore'-- intended, Dixon has at length discover'd, to bully his students into believing there must have been some train of logic they fail'd to see,--"

"Gentlemen, you have fallen, willy-nilly, among a race who not only devour Astronomers as a matter of habitual Diet, but may also make of them vile miniature 'Sandwiches,' and lay them upon a mahogany Sideboard whose Price they never knew, and then forget to eat them."

"Why is it that we honour the Great Thieves of Whitehall, for Acts that in Whitechapel would merit hanging? Why admire the one sort of Thief, and despise the other? I suggest, 'tis because of the Scale of the Crime.-- What we of the Mobility love to watch, is any of the Great Motrices, Greed, Lust, Revenge, taken out of all measure, brought quite past the scale of the ev'ryday world, approaching what we always knew were the true Dimensions of Desire. Let Antony lose the world for Cleopatra, to be sure,-- not Dick his Day's Wages, at the Tavern."

"A Virginia Boy, seven or eight or thereabouts, comes running up to quiz with them. 'I can show you something no one has ever seen, nor will anyone ever see again.' Mason squints in thought. 'There's no such thing.' The lad produces an unopen'd Goober Pea-Shell, exhibiting it to both Astronomers before cracking it open to reveal two red Pea-Nuts within,--'Something no-one has seen,'--popping them in his mouth and eating them,--'and no one will see again.' The Gents, astonish'd, for a moment look like a match'd pair of Goobers themselves."