Despite nine novels, a fistful of prize nominations and a couple of prizes, including a US National Book Award for this fine effort, Richard Powers is not a big name. Perhaps he lacks a unique selling point. The Echo Maker does have a certain air of generic high-grade American fiction about it: an eloquent style, a strongly localised setting and a wealth of arcane and intricately researched detail, in this case to do with neurology and sandhill cranes.

The cranes flock every year to a stretch of the Platte river near Kearney, Nebraska. This is a landscape “so level it would make Euclid blush”. Not much goes on round here and the birds are an important tourist attraction. Even so, development is drawing off enough water from the river to affect the habitat, and the developers are in danger of killing the, uh, goose that laid the golden egg.

The birds get a fright one night when a Dodge Ram pick-up truck abruptly somersaults off the nearby road. The driver, young Mark Schluter, a machine minder at the meat-packing plant, ends up in hospital with head injuries. His parents died years ago, so his sister Karin has to quit her job in Iowa to look after him and handle the medical insurance bureaucracy.

This is a thankless task. Although Mark makes a fairly good recovery, considering, he develops the rare Capgras syndrome, the belief that a loved one has been replaced by a double. Sometimes Capgras sufferers think the double is a robot, but Mark just thinks that “Kopy Karin” or “K2”, “the Pseudo-Sib”, is an agent working for some nefarious “Special Ops” outfit. The fact that she refers to things known only to his real sister just proves that “they” must be holding his real sister somewhere. He cannot remember the crash, but he knows there was something weird about it and he suspects this impostor is involved. (The reader suspects someone else. It’s all very intriguing.) Karin is depressed to be back home. She finds a batch of her childhood books, her name on the flyleaves, in a second-hand shop. “The curse of small-town life on a shallow river: your most prized possessions always turned up again, eternally resold.” But the Capgras thing is driving her to distraction. She enlists the help of Dr Gerald Weber, a celebrity neurologist in the Oliver Sacks mould. Somebody gropes to recall one of his book titles, “The Man Who Mistook His Life For A . . . ”

Weber is not much help, and the chapters to do with his marriage, his book-signing tours and his midlife crisis are something of a digression. But he does allow Powers to bring in plenty of curious material about the brain, consciousness and the nature of the self. Weber begins to wonder if the fashionably reductive view of the self as an illusion is as right as they say.

Powers, although clearly well up on the latest thinking, seems to take an old-fashioned approach himself. To solve the mystery of the accident — the truck flipping on a straight road, the tyre tracks other than Mark’s, the unknown Good Samaritan who called 911, the cryptic note left by Mark’s hospital bed (“I am No One but tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else”) — and restore Mark’s sanity, Powers resorts to a classic Freudian confrontation-trauma worthy of Hitchcock.

Karin, who has got into a pickle with two old flames, thinks, “Love was not an antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it, making and denying others, at random.” A version, perhaps, of Proust’s idea that love is a vessel into which we pour the beloved, making them take its shape. The book is rich in little and not-so-little aperçus like that.

Dear me, though. Americans. In the mass of crane lore, we learn that “the Hopi mark for the crane’s foot became the world’s peace symbol”. No; a British graphic designer invented it in the 1950s as a rather abstract visual play on the initials CND, and it’s also meant to remind you of a jet bomber in a banning circle like a road sign.

Still. For all the inevitable anticlimax that attends a story relying on what is essentially a whodunnit plot, the novel is full of character, in cast and locale, and it impressively manages to be both meditative and compelling.

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