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, featuring Native Americans
and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare,
conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse.
We follow the mismatched 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-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange 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.
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