Charles Mason (1728 -1786) & Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British Surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania & Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon in an updated eighteenth-century novel featuring Native Americans & frontier folk ripped bodices naval warfare conspiracies erotic & political & major caffeine abuse We follow the mismatch'd 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-Revoluntionary America & back through the stange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere as they observe & participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason