THE SPECTATOR
WEB

Home > The Magazine > Books

RSS

Contact us

Saturday 17 May 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

The Echo Maker

Minds boggling in Nebraska

Richard Powers
Heinemann, 451pp, £17.99, ISBN 0434016330
Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk

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.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved