![]() ![]() ![]() This article explores the possibilities of nonhuman unknowability in fiction that speaks to the threat of ecological disaster in times of climate change. ![]() Rather, it is the birds’ mysteriousness that takes centre stage: how their calls, and their annual migrations, tap into an evolutionary history whose scale the human characters struggle to comprehend, ‘a single splintering, tone-deaf chorus stretching miles in every direction, back into the Pleistocene’ ( Citation2006, 422). A few lyrical passages early in the novel convey the cranes’ collectivity, but they are too abstract to result in cognitive empathy, or a sense of insight into the animals’ mental states. While Powers’s style repeatedly engages with the cranes’ supple bodies, their minds are kept at a respectful distance. But the birds remain silent about, and perhaps indifferent to, what becomes the crux of the plot – namely, the exact circumstances in which Mark lost control of his car. Richard Powers’s novel The Echo Maker casts a herd of sandhill cranes as the sole witness of a car crash in which the driver, Mark, suffers major brain damage. ![]()
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