Monday 7 July 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Liz Anderson

Liz suggests


The Echo Maker

Minds boggling in Nebraska

Richard Powers
Heinemann, 451pp, £17.99,
Patrick Skene Catling
Wednesday, 27th December 2006

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No 007, the hero of Richard Powers’ suspenseful new novel is a cognitive neurologist. The young man who urgently needs help is a mechanic in an abattoir in a small town in Nebraska. It is a welcome relief to read fiction so interestingly unpredictable, humane and educative. Instead of the consumerism, sex and violence of commonplace contemporary entertainment, the drama of The Echo Maker resides in the problem of how to integrate parts of a brain that have accidentally ceased to communicate with each other.

Powers makes no concessions to lay readers, but manages to make the significance of psychopharmacological name-dropping perfectly clear in its context. Medical technicalities do not impede the narrative flow, which bears various kinds of love, innocent and not so innocent, and even a contrapuntal theme on the threatened mass migration of sandhill cranes. The tiny birdbrains have been efficiently focused on accurate, seasonal long-distance navigation for aeons.

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