The Echo Maker weaves together the most disparate subjects in such a seamless way that I was left wondering why I hadn’t seen the connections before. Neuroscience, consciousness studies, medicine, bird migrations, and environmental destruction intersect in the lives of a handful of ordinary people who live on the broad Nebraska plains near the Platte River. The result is an amazing meditation on the reality of the self and the meaning of love and loyalty.
Mark Schluter survives a car accident and subsequent coma only to wake to a nightmare world in which nothing is exactly as it seems. Everyone and everything appears to be merely posing as itself; this new world is peopled with imposters. His sister Karen calls a world famous neuroscientist, Gerald Weber, for help with Mark’s condition, which appears to be a varient of Capgras Syndrome. Weber, in the meantime, undergoes his own crisis of consciousness. Sometimes you can know too much about how the brain works.
Be warned: This is a book in which words like “inferior temporal gyrus” make frequent appearances. The slightly plodding central narrative was enlivened for me by a sprinkling of anecdotes about strange states of consciousness and unconsciousness reminiscent of the stories in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Most interesting to me were Powers’s thoughts on the illusory nature of the self — an illusion we can’t afford to give up.
