After all this build-up, The Echo Maker turns out, happily, to be Powers's most accessible novel to date, showing an ever-increasing skill at marrying his titanic smarts to plots that move and breathe. It is a combination of naturalist concerns(the preservation of the cranes and the physical descriptions), neuro-science, dysfunctional family (with utter compassion and insight) and suspense thriller. Imagine what it would be like to think the person or people you love the most have been replaced by replica robots, aliens or government agents. As a birder, I loved the crane info too, tho I can see why it all the poetic images of them might seem blithering to many.

Weber's head would be stuffed with human thoughts, not the cold substitutes Powers offers: case study after case study after case study. What matters is not so much whether that world is the right one, but whether it can be shared: whether we can get other people to believe in our virtual realities, our family jokes, our hopeful life projects, and whether we can believe in theirs. And now The Echo Maker examines the working of the human brain and seems to want us to realise that people are far more complex than we might be tempted to make them: science sometimes tries to reduce people to a set of rules, whereas Powers seems to think there is more to us than that. Still, be that as it may, I have now read them all and they form, in my opinion, a formidable body of work: I think he is now firmly established as my favourite author. It's likely that her brother may never recognize her again, and after throwing her current lifestyle away for the sake of her brother, she'll be left with the realization that all of her efforts are in vain.It doesn't mean you're stupid or I'm stupid or the person who legitimately liked this book is stupid -- it just means the book isn't a fucking masterpiece. Now, take a second to consider the passage listed above, and a few more to consider the basic question of "selfness" or subjectivity. From a literary point of view, this rather is a disappointment: no sparkling prose, no warming story, no characters that you can or want to identify with, also no stylistic delights or ingenious changes in perspective, as in “The Time of our Singing”. When he lights upon something interesting, he'll stay awhile (often too long), pressing into the depths with occasionally gorgeous sentences. His heart pumps clearly throughout the pages, and he bridges the (DeLillo)authorial distance by making accessible the burning concerns of everyman.

Who left the note by Mark’s hospital bed the night of the accident, the one that sends him questing through town? He gets “brainy,” and earns it, introducing his readers, across his nine novels, to the intricacies of Watson and Crick, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the ins and outs of making a good bar of soap. Although I continued to enjoy the story, I ultimately felt the novel was much longer than it needed to be; there simply wasn’t enough plot to justify the number of pages.Meanwhile, Mark, armed only with a note left by an anonymous witness, attempts to learn what happened the night of his inexplicable accident. This, parallel to Mark's own journey, serves as a potent metaphor for the natural rhythms of life and the concept of coming back to where we started, yet altered. Please, if you've never read Richard Powers before, are considering it, and are put off by these reviews, take the chance and read his work anyway. Having put the idea of migrating birds into the reader’s head, Powers then jumps off into his main, human, story.

As an obvious corollary to that suspicion, I also suspect that consciousness as the substrate for subjectivity does not exist outside the realm of nervous system function or its nonbiological equivalent, if there is any.I haven’t mentioned the expert plot mechanics yet, Powers’s array of tiny enigmas and red herrings, all perfectly paced.

She saw that my job had me knee-deep in numbers and thought maybe I’d appreciate more words in my life for ballast. His books seem wrought rather than written, and try as he might, he can't help but make you feel just that little bit stupid. With “The Echo Maker,” Richard Powers vindicates this faith, employing his trademark facility with all manner of esoteric discourse, but never letting it overcome the essential human truth of his characters.The story starts with Mark, a young man in left in a coma after a car accident that almost killed him.