Michael Wood writes:

In each instance the machine makes the point but the point is not about machines. And in each instance humanity is not just found in the wrong place; it is apparently found, and then shuffled and scattered and lost again. This is Richard Powers's continuing subject, and he has been working at it throughout his career: nine novels now, beginning in 1985 with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, and including, apart from Galatea 2.2 (1995), Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988), The Gold Bug Variations (1991), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), Gain (1998), Plowing the Dark (2000) and The Time of Our Singing (2003). All of these books are fiercely intelligent, and often rather grim, because the damaging losses keep recurring. None of the earlier works, I think, quite manages the extraordinary patience and tough compassion of The Echo Maker. One unsentimental way of caring about one’s characters is to give them the right sort of hard time, and this project, possibly present in all these novels, is clearer now than it was.

(LRB 22 February 2007)

Heinemann | hardback 451 pp. |ISBN: 9780434016334