The Echo Maker: Richard Powers

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Then there is the setting, the Platte river in South Nebraska, a spectacular staging post on the migration path of sandhill cranes. Everything gets worked out by the end of the book, except that none of the main characters remain the same as they used to be.

Add to all of this, characters that are insufferable after ten or twenty pages, and all you have left is a really neat premise that gets carried away with its own ponderous lack of limits. For myself, I suspect that subjectivity is what the nervous system is all about, even at the most primitive levels of evolution. I liked this book for its study of the human brain at different zoom levels; from the evolutionary scale of millions of years, our reptilian brain and deep-rooted animal instincts connecting us to the cranes, the intriguing species Powers has chosen to present his case. When Mark finally comes out of the coma, he is convinced that this woman, who looks and talks and sounds just like his sister, is an imposter.

Accumulating fresh insights into the human brain, the doctor sees Mark as a living embodiment of his theories. No matter that the very idea that the human brain is a kind of computer is, in the words of the great neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, “one of the most remarkable misunderstandings in the history of science”; no matter that human judgement and creativity are not the output of a series of syntactical rules. It's a distraction, but not one without ironic reference to some of the book's themes: the physical mind under assault following a car wreck.

The two of them ended up at a restaurant back in Kearney, one of those chains drawn up in Minneapolis or Atlanta and faxed around the nation.The sections describing the sand cranes and their annual migrations are some of the most evocative in the book).