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sleight-of-hand, infuriate with quick-change artistry,
and befuddle with another disappearing act, leaving the
faithful to scramble for morsels of meaning or genius
until his next earthly manifestation.
One critic, in the Village Voice, has already likened
reviewing Mason & Dixon to “reviewing the Atlantic
ocean.” With its wilful opacity and encyclopedic
breadth of themes and subjects, distilling the novel to
a succinct summary while doing it justice is a pretty
daunting prospect. Mason & Dixon stands as a paradigm
of The Novel As Jigsaw Puzzle; here, you’re
expected to somehow connect the dots between such
elements as a talking dog (“the learn’d English dog,”
to be precise), a smiling electric eel used as a compass,
the evils of Indian massacres and the slave trade, the
first British pizza, the world’s largest cheese (the “octuple
Gloucester”, a “cheese malevolent”), an invisible,
lovelorn mechanical duck which chases a French chef
around the world (“la bec de la mort” – the beak of
death), the intricacies of astronomy and geometry, the
dualistic characters of Mason and Dixon, and the omnipresent
backdrop of collected American, European,
religious, and human history into a distinct impression,
a coherent whole. No mean feat.
Distinct themes, however, do ultimately emerge.
Mason & Dixon is about lines – not only the literal lines
of surveyors and mapmakers, but about boundaries in
the larger sense: Lines between good and evil, known
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and unknown, fantasy and fact, science and superstition,
past, present, and future; it is about the drawing
of these lines, the crossing of these lines, the blurring
and erasure of these lines, and the consequences of
doing so. Mason & Dixon’s task, to define the physical
parameters of America, stands as a metaphor for
the definition and creation of the country itself, as
performed by the supposedly enlightened and rational
explorers, colonists, founding fathers, kings, generals,
venture capitalists, and adventurers who did so. The
end result – the divided and sub-divided nation of ethnic
hatreds and strip malls, of class envy and suburban
sprawl, of glittering triumphs and monumental failures
– is the measure of their efforts, and the subtly-invoked
backdrop of Mason & Dixon.
In large measure, Mason & Dixon is ultimately a
lament for the failure of individuals and nations relative
to their dreams and their potential, as well as for
vanished frontiers – those of the physical world (the
conquest of nature and the wilderness) as well as the
spiritual (the waning power of religion and its corollary
elements, faith and imagination, at the hands of science
and commerce):
“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? And is
America her dream? – in which all that cannot pass
in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression
away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces,
and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp’d, nor
411
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