Book Review: Naomi Alderman's "The Power"

What if women got the chance to run the world? It is a thought experiment performed many times on varying scales, with a prominent example in current pop culture being the Amazons from Greek legend (i.e. an island full of women warriors ruled by a warrior queen). Naomi Alderman continues this tradition and goes a bit further to expose the power dynamics at work in our world in her 2017 novel The Power, in which teenage girls develop the power to generate and manipulate electricity to devastating affects. The women now seem to be turning the tide against the men. How would society look after that? How smooth would the transition be (or not be)?

Alderman gives readers five primary perspectives from which to probe the depths of the latter questions: Roxy Monke (daughter of a London crime boss), Allie (a foster kid who's suffered sexual and emotional abuse), Margot (a mayor with senatorial and presidential ambitions), Jocelyn (Margot's daughter and eventual soldier), and Tunde (a Nigerian journalist and one of the few prominent male voices in the novel). When the world rocks from the revelation that teenage girls have developed bio-electrical organs akin to electric eels (termed "skeins") that allow them electrical powers (and to pass them on to their older female counterparts), Tunde guides us through the larger world that the four primary female characters are exploring, showing everything from the chaotic gender revolutions of the Middle East and Eastern Europe to the tumultuous birth of a nation of women in southern Moldova (Bessapara).

What all of these characters learn (and the reader) is the nature of power in human hands and its corrupting nature as this newly emerging female-dominated world ultimately carries on the very power imbalances that went against women for millennia. While the women ascend to many leadership positions in institutions previously male-dominated, there is of course push back from many men and "men's rights" groups. Like American War, The Power is very successful in turning the world as we know it upside down while at the same time exposing all of its ugly aspects (i.e. the military-industrial complex; sexual, physical, and emotional violence; the seedy interactions between crime syndicates and political institutions).

It was a surreal experience, going from the introduction of the book by future narrators reviewing a historical novel for publication to the elation I experienced as a woman reading the first part of a book in the awakening of the women and the realization of their strength. Admittedly, there was also a sense of poetic justice as matriarchal political, economic, social, and religious institutions rose (the most interesting being a form of religious universalism led by Allie or "Mother Eve" after fleeing to a convent following her self-defense killing of her sexual abuser and former stepfather). A female God rises to match the earthly equivalent establishment of a matriarchal culture and female supremacy. Mother Eve thunders for "Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses...Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation" (Alderman, 2017, p. 127). By calling on women to remember "that which you have forgotten," Mother Eve marshals formidable symbolic power of female empowerment (one of many symbols). Or so we thought. There's always a dark side to power.

"She cuppeth the power in her hand. She commandeth it to strike." (Alderman, 2017, p. 358)

As the book progressed and the women fell into the trap of ultimate power, abusing it horrifically (doling out the same suffering onto men that they'd experienced at the hands of mostly male, sometimes female, abusers), I found myself becoming more crestfallen and questioning if the world can realize a balance between the two genders without one triggering a backlash at a perceived loss of power that's actually a loss of privilege, a closing of the gap. This revelation of the rot that power can bring, the temptation to right the wrongs of the past yourself with force, comes full circle as the messianic complex Allie has shatters upon coming to the brink of wanting to unleash an apocalypse in order to remake the world from scratch and relieve a lifetime of pain and trauma. It is interesting and horrifying then that all of the players in the game, from the powerful female figures to the powerless to the male terrorist groups all bring about the world's end intentionally, both trying to find a way to "dismantle the old house and begin again" in their own image (oh, and to try and not screw up as big next time around) (Alderman, 2017, p. 370). No balance on either side in trying to find a way to build a better, more egalitarian civilization, just an inexorable and inelegant blasting "entirely to pieces" the constantly shifting "shape of the tree of power" (Alderman, 2017, p. 364).

Ultimately, as the narrators in the post-apocalyptic future close out the story by corresponding one last time before the release of the "historical novel" of The Power, I found myself thinking of feminism and power. Mostly power and its nature. After the last paragraph, in which the narrator jokes with the male author of the novel if he'd rather publish it under a female name (this future society is skewed firmly in the matriarchal direction), I wondered if because power is unpredictable and doesn't discriminate between potential vessels, is it possible to completely root out the corruption inherent in power if you use overwhelming power (in whatever form) to try and stop it? Then, how does one stop abuses of power? Whatever the answer, it seems to me like we as a society need a new approach in order to strive towards a more egalitarian world.


Works Cited:

Alderman, Naomi. (2017). The Power. New York: Hachette Book Group.