Book of a lifetime: Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

From The Independent archive: Marek Kohn on the exhilirating prose in Pynchon’s 800-page epic

Pynchon in high school, 1953 (Public Domain)

In his current incarnation as a celebrated virtuoso of Twitter, Dr Samuel Johnson has cannily matched the struck poses, the snorted expostulations and the triumphant aphorisms of his century’s discourse to the frame of the tweet. But 18th-century texts did not confine themselves to 140 characters or fewer. Novels went on as long they liked. Exuberantly upholding that tradition at the end of the 20th century, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon begins with a sentence not of 140 characters but 120 words, and continues in the same vein for nearly 800 pages.

“Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins...” and we’re off. I took more delight in that first sentence than I think I’ve probably taken from most of the novels I’ve read since; the whole of the book fulfilled the promise of its opening, particularly in its comic timing and the kindly warmth of spirit that discreetly infuses it. The protagonists are the Englishmen Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, astronomers and surveyors, helping first to measure the distance to the sun and then to translate lines on a map of the American colonies into lines on the ground. The resulting Mason-Dixon line subsequently divided the “free” North from the slave states of the South. That is another story, though.

This one is set in a world where the mechanical is still outshone by the fantastical. Astronomers admit to each other that they used to do zodiac charts, like masseurs confiding that they performed additional services; the clocks used to measure the transits of Venus gossip among themselves about the rudeness of native clocks in foreign parts. Science is pulling itself away from poetry, though.