When encountered, Oz the Great and Terrible does a pretty good imitation of God, manifesting himself as a ball of fire, a fierce beast, a lovely lady, a giant head—all of these have Biblical or theological precedents—and finally as a disembodied voice that announces, “I am everywhere.” But then he’s revealed as an imposter—he’s just a ventriloquist and sideshow performer from Omaha, Nebraska, who was blown over the deserts that encircle Oz in an off-course balloon. Even the colour of the Emerald City is an illusion, produced by the green glasses everyone in it wears. So the Wizard has no real magic powers; but the witches do, and the Wizard has put on his God show to frighten them off.

  Deficient males, powerful females, in a land of imitations, in the heart of the heartland of America. In the 1939 film version, the Land of Oz—the Land of Awes, surely—is inside Dorothy’s head. Dorothy has been knocked unconscious during the tornado, and has been dreaming. Oz, like the “country of surprise” in Dr. Weber’s book, is a land of brain episodes. The Kingdom of Oz—like Christ’s Kingdom of God, like Milton’s inner Paradise, and like Weber’s reality-as-we-experience-it and body-as-place-as-postcard—is within.

  If The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the underlying sketch for The Echo Maker—if the former is the theme on which the latter builds its variations—then Mark’s sister, Karin, is an ironic Dorothy figure. She’s not “home” because she wants to be there—on the contrary, she tried very hard to get away from Kearney. Her difficulty is not that “there’s no place like home” in the old sense, but that there’s no place available to her that even remotely resembles the idea of the home. “There’s no place like home” has taken on a modern, ominous meaning; there is, literally, no trustworthy home.

  Mark would correspond to the scarecrow figure, the brain-deficient one; wispy-bearded, vegetarian Daniel (the non-lion in the lions’ den) is the one lacking in balls; and Robert Karsh, the developer, is the flashy tin man without a heart. (The winged monkeys—destructive or helpful, depending on the situation—may possibly be represented by Mark’s two primitive-minded video-gaming pals, fellow travellers to yet another realm of virtual reality.)

  Dr. Weber is of course the wizard as fraud; he too comes and goes through the air, though he uses an airplane, not a balloon. Like the Wizard, he too finds an unsuspected strength hidden beneath his own fakery. Barbara—who seems to have magic powers of some kind—might be a blend of Glinda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West.

  What shared void brings Weber and Barbara together? What are they doing lying entwined on the ground with all those sandhill cranes around them, in that cold field, in the dead of night? Is Glinda the Good really Glinda the Bad? Why is kindly Barbie Doll so empty and depressed, and how did she get that way? Was it a surfeit of world news, or something more personal? Both, as it turns out, because in Powers’s novels the mini-story always connects with the bigger picture.

  We’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re not even in Oz. We’re in Nebraska, the ruined heart of the heartland of America, and things are looking grim. As an answer to the hypothetical question “What has happened to America?,” The Echo Maker does not initially offer much solace. But it does at length offer some. There’s grace of a sort to be had, in the country of surprise. There’s forgiveness to be at least tried out. There are amends to be made.

  * * *

  —

  The amends to be made have, in the end, something to do with the cranes because Powers has paid attention to Chekhov’s observation that if there’s a pistol on the table in the first act, it has to go off in the third. There are cranes on the first page of the book, and at the beginning of each of the next four sections, so we know that something will therefore—most likely—be made of these cranes at the end of the book. They are dependent on the wide Platte River, but it is shrinking, due to the water-guzzling depredations of men like Robert.

  It’s always difficult to meld the world of nature and the human world in novels. Unless you introduce talking bunnies or their equivalent—tame beavers, perhaps—it’s hard to paper over the fact that nature’s wild denizens don’t really care about people very much unless they can eat them, or unless they’re being hunted by them. And people—including readers—care mostly about other people, just as termites care mostly about other termites. Such things as sandhill cranes may inspire awe, and wonder, and joy, and curiosity, and transcendent delight, but they don’t inspire fuzzy huggy feelings. Quite the opposite.

  Powers doesn’t paper this part over. Instead, he emphasizes it. “The outcome of owls will orchestrate the night,” he says, “millions of years after people work their own end. Nothing will miss us.” But the wild cranes in the heart of the heartland are threatened because people do not recognize them for the essential spiritual lifeblood that they are. Mankind may do itself in, but it will do in a lot of other creatures first.

  The book’s preoccupation with the destruction of nature may seem very modern—trendy, even—but it is in fact a very old strain in American literature. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales—a series that was arguably the first major stab at using the novel as a method of exploring the American reality and psyche—began with the 1823 novel The Pioneers. In it, Natty Bumppo, the forest-dweller and companion of Indians, is a ludicrous and victimized elderly man. Cooper took a lot from Walter Scott and the Waverley novels, and the Pioneers version of Natty is the equivalent of the wild but droll, savage but noble, comic but tragic dialect-speaking Highlanders in Scott’s novels. In subsequent Leatherstocking books, Natty was to grow younger and younger as he receded farther and farther into the pristine, unspoiled wilderness of an earlier time. He was to accumulate a batch of more heroic-sounding titles—Pathfinder, Deerslayer, Hawkeye—as if Cooper wished he hadn’t initially stuck the poor man with such a boobyish name as “Bumppo.”

  It’s in The Pioneers, however, that Natty takes his first, eloquent stand against the greed that is threatening to destroy the abundance of nature. God made both man and the other creatures, Natty asserts. God allows man to kill and eat his other creatures—just as they kill and eat one another—but such killing and eating should be done only to satisfy hunger and supply immediate needs, and should be treated as a gift. The incoming settlers, however, are indulging in wholesale slaughter—killing not because they must but because they can. They are grasping gluttons, intent on turning a profit. They have no respect for God’s creation, and the end of their wastefulness will be famine.

  Cooper’s Natty was concerned with the obliteration of fish and game. The passenger pigeon had not yet been wiped from the face of the planet, so it did not occur to him that the same forces that were depleting the woods of deer might later deplete the world of entire species. Disgusted by the incursions of the mass killers and money-grubbers, Natty finally fades away into the wilderness, where he feels more at home. Daniel’s contemplation of the vanishing sandhill crane is not far in spirit from Natty Bumppo, and at the novel’s end he takes a similar course of action, moving farther north, farther away from the blight of Kearney and, by extension, of America. “Doesn’t want to be around, when we finally wreck the place,” as Mark puts it.

  The cranes are most likely doomed by man; they’re living fossils, but so very possibly are we. Why then should people like Daniel devote their lives to saving them? Perhaps because birds have always represented the human soul, to our imaginations: the epigraph of The Echo Maker is “To find the soul it is necessary to lose it.” This is a book about lost souls, but it is also about souls that are found again. The lines of the creepy anonymous note that has so bedevilled Mark turn out to have a sort of truth to them: in order to find your own lost soul, you have to “bring back someone else.” The solution to Mark’s frightening doubled world may be found in the doctor’s bag of chemical gizmos, but it also lies in another realm entirely.

  That neuroscience would consider “the soul” to be just some brain-event illusion is beside the point: in its terms, everything is a brain-event illusion, including the body, so if we think we have “souls,” it’s the same as actually having them. The old self-help truism—you can change the world by the way you think about it—may be accurate, after all. We must live as if the replica were the original—as if it were worth saving and improving—because there’s no other option available to us. As Mark is finally able to say, “Just as good…I mean, us. You. Me. Here…Whatever you call all this. Just as good as the real thing.”

  The Echo Maker is a grand novel—grand in its reach, grand in its themes, grand in its patterning. That it might sometimes stray over the line into the grandiose is perhaps unavoidable: Powers is not a painter of miniatures. Of the two extremes of American mannerist style, the minimalist or Shaker chair (Dickinson, Hemingway, Carver) and the maximalist or Gilded Age (Whitman, James, Jonathan Safran Foer), Powers inclines toward the latter. He gets his effects by repetition, by a Goldberg Variations–like elaboration of motifs, by cranking up the volume and pulling out all the stops.

  It all adds up to one enormous oratorio-like brain episode. You stagger out of Powers’s novel happy to find yourself, like Scrooge the morning after, grasping your own bedpost, saying, “There’s no place like home,” and hoping you still have a chance to set things right. As a slice of virtual reality, The Echo Maker is just as good as the real thing—or, as Mark Schluter says, “In some ways, even better.”

  Skip Notes

  * Although he did win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2019 for his twelfth novel, The Overstory.

  Wetlands

  (2006)

  It’s a real pleasure to be here with you this evening, at the Charles Sauriol Environmental Dinner. The proceeds from this dinner will be used by the Oak Ridges Moraine Land Trust and the Conservation Foundation of Greater Toronto. Together, these two organizations have protected thousands of acres of land; they are part of a growing movement—growing in awareness, growing in effectiveness, growing in advocacy power—propelled forward by people who realize that big oak trees grow from little acorns, and cannot grow without little acorns; and that all trees and indeed all life on dry land—which would include us language-wielding bipeds—needs soil and water, and clean air, and careful and informed consideration. Countless hours of thought and volunteer work have gone into these organizations. Everyone here applauds this work, and is proud to have been a part of it.

  If organizations like this succeed in their work, you’ll breathe easier, in so many more ways than one. You’ll feel you’ve done something to help in a much larger struggle—the struggle against global warming and the huge amount of devastation it will bring, and is already bringing. You’ll sleep better at night, partly—let’s hope—because you won’t be coughing so much.

  I’m not a politician, so you may wonder what I’m doing making a speech on what has already become a political hot potato. Hot in so many ways: according to those who measure such things, including NASA, Earth is hotter now than it’s been for millennia. If it gets very much hotter, we’ll soon be beyond the point of no return.

  “Oh well, that Margaret,” they sometimes say. “She’s just a fiction writer.” Yes, I am a fiction writer, and that gives me a big advantage in the truth-or-fiction arena: unlike some politicians, I do know the difference between the two. Here’s a bit from a piece I wrote for Granta last year—non-fiction this time. The subject was the melting Arctic ice, a situation I’ve seen for myself.

  “You could write a science fiction novel about it,” I said, “except that it wouldn’t be science fiction. You could call it Icemelt. Suddenly there are no more small organisms, thus no fish up there, thus no seals. That wouldn’t affect the average urban condo-dweller much. The rising water levels from—say—the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would get attention—no more Long Island or Florida, no more Bangladesh, and quite a few islands would disappear—but people could just migrate, couldn’t they? Still no huge cause for alarm unless you own a lot of shorefront real estate.

  “But wait: there’s ice under the earth, as well as on top of the sea. It’s the permafrost, under the tundra. There’s a lot of it, and a lot of tundra as well. Once the permafrost starts to melt, the peat on the tundra—thousands of years of organic matter—will start to break down, releasing huge quantities of methane gas. Up goes the air temperature, down goes the oxygen ratio. Then how long will it take before we all choke and boil to death?”

  People sometimes tell me I can be a little harsh. “Now, Margaret,” they say. “Isn’t that a little harsh?” As if, by saying that the bare-naked emperor has in fact got no clothes on, I’d trampled a kitten or something.

  So harsh, to wake sleepwalkers from their trance. Everyone would much rather be told that things are fine, the world is safe, we’re all nice people, and nothing is anyone’s fault—above all, that we can keep on doing exactly whatever we like, without taking any thought or changing our so-called lifestyle in the least, and there will be no bad consequences. I’d like to be told that too. Trouble is, it’s not true. So maybe it’s time to be a little harsh. The situation we find ourselves in cannot be dealt with through anything less than plain speaking.

  For a long time now I’ve had a habit of clipping things out of newspapers and magazines, or downloading them from the Internet. When I was writing my 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, set in the not-so-distant future, when global warming has raised sea levels so that New York is under water and there isn’t any red-leaved autumn in New England because the climate there is semi-tropical, I built up a little stash of articles to corroborate such details, in case anyone might accuse me of hallucinating. Back then—just a few years ago—I was getting these pieces from science-oriented magazines, or from the science pages of newspapers. You had to search for this stuff.

  But in the past year I haven’t been able to keep up. There’s been a deluge. The bad news has moved from the science pages to the covers of magazines like Newsweek, which in October carried a full spread on global warming. “Last Chance for Fish,” proclaimed one insert; another piece was on frogs, another on coral, another on rainforest damage. In the first presidential campaign that George Bush sort of maybe won, his opponent Al Gore was derided for his green views. Not anymore.

  Along with the bad news, there’s some good news—reclamation projects that have succeeded, new technologies that will help us live greener lives. It’s all happening very, very fast. For instance, we know the albatross is in trouble, due to human fishing methods. We even know how to save it. It wouldn’t even cost that much. We just need the money.

  The trouble with raising money for conservation, including birds and animals, is that people have trouble seeing the connection between human beings and the rest of the world. If you grow up behind plate-glass windows, if all your food comes from the supermarket, if you think water is generated by the faucet, you’re going to have some trouble putting two and two together—until, that is, New Orleans floods or your own lights go out or you die because of contaminated spinach or the E. coli in your town water supply.

  Of all charitable giving, only about 3 per cent goes to animal-related causes, and of that 3 per cent, half of it goes to human pets such as dogs and cats. We prefer to give to poor people, or to hospitals with heart and kidney foundations. But as you all know, degrade the environment—degrade it worldwide, as is now happening—and you’ll get more poor people than you can possibly ever deal with. We’re there already, come to think of it—because all human wealth is, in the end, based on the earth. As someone recently quipped, “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.” Wreck the earth and you’re wrecking yourself, and then it won’t matter how much money you’ve given to hearts and kidneys because nobody will have hearts and kidneys anyway.

  I myself didn’t grow up behind plate-glass windows. As a child, I led the kind of double existence that used to be more typical of Canadians—part-time in the boreal forest, part-time in cities. In the forest we always had a garden because that was the only way we could get fresh greens—by growing them. And we got fresh fish by catching them. So I was pretty conscious about where food came from.

  Because of my belief that we’re living in decisive times and that small choices do make a difference, I recently started writing a set of green protocols to be used in my own home and my own office. In order to do that, I had to take stock—yet once more—of how I was in fact living. It’s amazing where such an examination will lead you.

  In our house, we’d already done quite a few things—the low-energy car, the list of permissible fish we carry around with us and haul out in restaurants and at the fish store, the elimination of air conditioning from our home, the installation of a couple of solar panels, the discarding of evil cleaning products, the low-energy, low-water washing machine, the recycling and reusing, the supporting of Forest Stewardship paper for our books—but as we took stock, we realized there was so much more to be done.

  Conscious Green Living is as exacting as some relentless religious program—there’s a sort of catechism that goes along with it, and an exhaustive list of sins. Just try avoiding paper towels in washrooms, or those hopelessly wasteful hot-air hand dryers that don’t work anyway. It can be done—you carry a handkerchief, you use that, you discover it weeks later balled up in a mildewy corner in your purse—but it’s hard. You do get the hang of it after a while, though. Like almost everything else, it’s habit.

  Trouble is, people who are making this difficult attempt feel they’re going it alone. They aren’t getting much official help, certainly not from our federal government. Private gains are being cancelled out by public losses.