Book Review: "Mason & Dixon" by Thomas Pynchon

Oh lord have I got something to tell you. I found this book almost impossible to crack. It's April 2025 and I have been reading this book for about a week and a half almost constantly. I've taken it everywhere if not only to read a few pages whilst sitting in waiting rooms for appointments or on the bus to go somewhere. Thomas Pynchon is a challenging writer at the best of times, but I feel like this book was more about me breaking that wall than actually enjoying what I'm reading. There's a fine line there that I didn't have to deal with when reading Inherent Vice and I'm unsure what to make of it. So apart from me ranting about how weird this book is, let's take a look at a fairly interesting section: the storyline...

The book starts in 1786 in a frame narrative where Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke - a fairly eccentric man, is telling the story of Mason and Dixon to a bunch of relatives and children. They are in the home of Charles Mason and this is where it gets weird: the Reverend seems to know he is an unreliable narrator. The style of his speech is really quite archaic and though this reflects the time in which the story is set - it does make the little side steps that the Reverend does into quite ornate digressions quite difficult to read. It did give me a bit of a headache after a while. But nonetheless, it was still something that was different and interesting to my usual requests in literature.

Charles Mason, a widowed, melancholy astronomer, and Jeremiah Dixon, a roguish and good-humoured surveyor, meet in Greenwich in 1761. They are tasked with observing the Transit of Venus from the island of St. Helena. This is where we start to see the real personalities of the characters come through and it's also possibly one of my favourite parts of the whole book because it gives us a 'first impression' as it were, of the characters. Mason is volatile and Dixon is grounded. Their task is something that really does encompass the Enlightenment in that it is both scientific and it is political - of course through this we also see that it is a part of that reason and order that the era represents as well.

I think that the way Pynchon draws our attention to the Enlightenment ideas in the book is quite profound. There is definitely an instability when it comes to the cross-section of empire, science and personal ambition. This will later manifest itself in the breakdown of the friendship between Mason and Dixon.

After their return to England, Mason and Dixon are chosen by the Royal Society to resolve a colonial boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland; a conflict that reflects deeper tensions in pre-Revolutionary America. They are to draw a line across the American wilderness, an act of rationality through boundaries in a land teeming with irrational forces: indigenous resistance, slavery, and the spiritual unrest of a colonised continent. This might be the story yes, but the more interesting thing is to see the way they both react to leaving their lives in England behind for America. Mason is mournful: he does not want to leave behind his children and yet, Dixon sees the opportunity in the next big thing. Apart from Pynchon's critique of the Enlightenment as a time of divisive control, I think that it was far more interesting to read about how these two main characters are slowly drifting apart in their ideals.

Upon arriving in America, Mason and Dixon find themselves entangled in a society filled with contradictions: technologically advanced yet morally bankrupt, obsessed with liberty yet founded on slavery. They stay in Philadelphia and meet Benjamin Franklin, who offers them his own blend of wit, science, and subversion. Benjamin Franklin is written in an exaggerated and comical way, almost as though he is a caricature of himself. This is also true for a lot of the historical characters that appear in this book. I would even go as far as saying that it's true for Mason and Dixon as well. It does however, make the book seem more chaotic and I don't really know how I feel about that.

As the book moves on, we see them create the Mason-Dixon line and impose that human element upon the wilderness. Mason becomes more obsessed with the morals and mythologies of the mission whereas Dixon remains quite adaptable. The whole situation feels like its thrusting us back into those explorers who also suffered great discontents with each other whilst on a mythical quest, such as: Lewis and Clark. They witness the true brutalities of American slavery and how people were treated with sheer cruelty. It results in Dixon becoming so agitated he even strikes a slave driver at one point in a fit of rage. It is clear that as the surreal nature of the book becomes more and more apparent, Mason and Dixon can no longer ignore the paradoxes of the Enlightenment that lie right in front of them. We start to see weird things through this time such as mechanical ducks, strange things happening to clocks and even astral projection (yes, this is why it was difficult to get stuck into). Time itself, seems to be collapsing.

As the journey comes to its supernatural peaks and then, begins to end - we see that Pynchon is using this time to present strains to Mason and Dixon’s friendship to us. From moral divisions to emotional outbursts, the detachment of their work can no longer be as the world before them falls apart. This is actually quite profound.

All in all, I found this book to be oddly written and difficult to get into, but the storyline is pretty fantastic. A huge critique of the Enlightenment and how people (especially in modern times) worship it without fully understanding its hypocrisies. If we are to judge the story and the way its told, I could give this a higher mark than most mind-bending books I’ve read.