Thomas Pynchon · 1997 · global

Pynchon's eight-hundred-page novel about the two Englishmen who cut the Mason-Dixon Line, written in eighteenth-century prose and full of talking dogs and mechanical ducks. They meet at Portsmouth, are shot at by the French before they clear the Channel, observe the transit from the Cape, and spend four years dragging a straight line west through American forest.

1. 1
   Greenwich

   Home to England and the rest of their lives - and the Line they cut through the forest becomes, eighty years later, the boundary between the slave states and the free, which neither of them intended or foresaw.

2. 2
   Portsmouth

   Where the novel actually opens: the two meet for the first time in a naval town in 1761, retire to an ale house before sailing, and fall in with the Learned English Dog and a shipmate called Fender-Belly Bodine.

3. 3
   Off Start Point

   Within a day of sailing the Seahorse is run down by l'Grand, a thirty-four-gun French frigate. The French break off as inexplicably as they began - France, their captain says, is not at war with the sciences.

4. 4
   Plymouth

   The Seahorse limps in with broken masts and thirty-odd casualties. Mason and Dixon write to the Royal Society asking to be let off, and are told they may expect the most inflexible resentment and the utmost severity of law.

5. 5
   Cape Town

   1761, the Dutch colony at the foot of Africa, where they take the transit and where the novel starts doing what it does - a talking dog, a mechanical duck, and slavery observed by two Englishmen with nowhere to put it.

6. 6
   St Helena

   The lonely rock in the South Atlantic where Maskelyne is going quietly strange with the wind - and where Mason spends months in the company of a man who will later become Astronomer Royal and rewrite the rules.

7. 7
   Philadelphia

   1763, and the American commission: Penn and Calvert have been arguing about a border for eighty years, and two Englishmen with a zenith sector are hired to settle it with mathematics rather than lawyers.

8. 8
   The Tangent Point

   Where the Line begins - a twelve-mile arc round New Castle, a tangent, a wedge, and the strangest piece of surveying geometry in America, all of it real and all of it still there on the map today.

9. 9
   Dunkard Creek

   Two hundred and thirty-three miles west, and the Indian escort will go no further because the Line has reached the Warpath - so they stop, and Pynchon makes the unfinished border the whole point of the book.

10. 10
    Greenwich

    Home to England and the rest of their lives - and the Line they cut through the forest becomes, eighty years later, the boundary between the slave states and the free, which neither of them intended or foresaw.