Status
Collection
Publication
Description
In this stunning bestseller praised as "our era's Handmaid's Tale," a fierce new power has emerged--and only women have it (Washington Post). In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: there's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways. "Captivating, fierce, and unsettling...I was riveted by every page. Alderman's prose is immersive and, well, electric." --New York Times Book Review… (more)
Media reviews
User reviews
The frame narrative in which a man amusingly (to his indulgent female betters) reconstructs a forgotten world in which men had power over women doesn’t make sense, because the core story includes realistic details that the frame narrative insists are lost to history. And the ways in which women quickly reverse all our current stereotypes and atrocities to inflict them on men didn’t work for me. The twentieth century is replete with evidence that discrimination, and even genocide, can arise quickly, so I can’t say it wasn’t plausible in some sense, but this version didn’t feel inventive enough to be worth the effort. Women immediately switching to rape as part of warfare, sexually harassing men in the workforce, deciding that they were more intelligent than men, denying men the right to drive, requiring all men to have female guardians (because they’re so dangerous on their own), even ultimately engaging in male genital mutilation so that only electric stimulation could get them hard and orgasm was often painful; men starting to simper and pretend to be dumb to curry favor with women—all this seemed to lack imagination.
More broadly, I have deep reservations about the implicit argument that, if women could easily kill men, the current social category “men” would turn into the current (or even more retrograde) social category “women.” First, there’s the question of ideology: so far, patriarchy has been relatively successful at revaluing male as good and female as bad no matter what—see, e.g., the treatment of doctors (a heavily female profession in Russia, heavily male traditionally in the US). The counterargument can’t lightly be set aside: the book shows a political candidate who loses her temper and nearly shocks her male opponent when he says something nasty to her, and it’s that very display of nearly unchecked power, and willingness to use it, that wins her the election even though people say they disapprove. After 2016 I can’t say for sure that voters would react otherwise, but I also think there’s an existing narrative of female unreliability/emotionality that would work against such a switch. After all, it’s not like Trump actually was stronger than Clinton—he’s an unhealthy coward. I have trouble believing that women would become the class to whom that kind of power was attributed and for whom that kind of willingness to harm was valued in a few years. But even after that, the implicit argument of the book is that systematic oppression grows out of the physical power disparity of men and women, to which I respond: chattel slavery was imposed on people who were often physically more powerful than their enslavers. There were indeed revolts, some of them successful, but slavery also persisted where enslavers were able to keep enslaved people divided, to threaten them with massive retaliation if they exercised their physical power against enslavers, and to hold hostages for good behavior. With a preexisting ideology supporting patriarchy and preexisting divisions among women (not least race-based), I am dubious that the switch the book describes would happen. I presume the thought is, well, that’s why the Cataclysm occurred—there was enough of a backlash to create global war sufficiently destructive to leave almost no intact artifacts or even information behind. But even if that’s the worldbuilding answer, by only featuring characters who accept that the polarities of gender have been reversed, Alderman creates the impression of unity in reaction (even if a lot of the men are mad about the change, they all accept that it has happened).
The characters are also mostly—well, I can also no longer say that cartoon villainy is implausible; 2017’s storyline is proof of that. But that doesn’t mean that it’s fun to read about, or what I go to f/sf to get. Still, I have to admit that even though I’ve tried to unlearn a lot of gendered codes I was discomfited by the supplicating tone in which the man in the frame story wrote his female mentor—and I likely wouldn’t have been as sensitized to the same note written by a young woman to her male mentor.
I bought it as a bit of a punt while
It seems to cross several different genres, excelling in each of them. While reading it I was considering how I might describe it, and found myself wavering between dystopian literature, science fiction, political observation, satire and straightforward thriller. Well, they will do for a start, though there are also moments of wry humour and quasi-religious bliss.
It also classifies as meta-fiction, with the bulk of the book taking the form of a manuscript of anthropological research into the events that culminated in a devastating, world-eclipsing apocalypse, sandwiched by brief correspondence from the supposed researcher and his editor. Their closing exchanges form the crowning glory of an already marvellous novel.
The story revolves around the discovery that, when finding themselves placed under sudden stress, some girls and young women can generate and apply a devastating electrostatic charge. This becomes known as ‘the power’. Having once unleashed the power, young women find that they are also able to release it in older women. All at once, around the world girls find that they can not only protect themselves from physical assault, but can use their charge as an offensive weapon, too.
Alderman describes masterfully the way in which the phenomenon spreads around the world and how different cultures respond. The story focuses on four characters: Allie, who unleashes the power to enable herself to escape from her abusive adoptive parents; Margot, mayor of a northern city in the USA who is ambitious to progress further up the political ladder, though that aspiration is challenged by the sudden awakening of the power in her elder daughter; Roxy, daughter of an East End villain who yearns to avenge the murder of her ‘gangster’s moll’ mother; and Tunde, a Nigerian student who captures mobile phone footage of some early incidents of the unleashing of the power, and launches a successful career as an international journalist as a consequence. The novel unwinds with interpolated narratives following each of these characters, with a few others thrown in, as the story counts down towards an unspecified event.
I don’t want to say much more about the content for fear of inadvertently offering spoliers. Alderman manages the separate threads very capably, interspersing them with facsimile archeolgical notes and addenda, all of which lend a deep patina of verisimilitude. Any dystopian literature, particularly if there is an essentially feminist theme, will automatically draw comparisons with Margaret Atwood. In this case those worthy plaudits are entirely justified. This is, quite simply, an amazing, imaginative and haunting novel.
The story of how this power changes the world is told mainly through four points of view: Allie, who becomes the head of a new religion emphasising God’s female nature by transforming herself into Mother Eve; a London gangster’s daughter called Roxy; Margot Cleary, a US city mayor eager for further political advancement and Tunde who, initially by accident, becomes the journalistic chronicler of events.
There is, of course, a backlash to the new reality, both in the political sphere and in the darker (and perhaps not so hidden) recesses of the internet. One conspiracy theorist called UrbanDox believes that Guardian Angel was leaked deliberately just to do men down.
Yet Alderman’s is no simplistic account. Biblical cadences emphasise the mythical nature of the origins of her future society. Her characters are by and large agreeably nuanced, their actions not entirely predictable but still credible. Roxy is wonderfully realised but I wasn’t entirely convinced by Alderman’s US ones, and wondered whether Saudi Arabian women would throw off sexual inhibitions quite so quickly as one does here. But I suppose in the heady throes of a revolution anything might go and Alderman’s tale implicitly argues that human nature is indivisible, characteristics and behaviours shown by any one individual may or may not be shown by others, irrespective of their sex.
Where I have major reservations is with the framing device, a series of letters supposedly sent five thousand years hence between “Neil” and “Naomi” wrapped around the contents of a manuscript whose title page reads The Power: a historical novel by Neil Adam Armon (the anagram is easily deciphered) and which purports to be an imaginative, speculative, account of how the power originated and precipitated what became known as the Cataclysm. These letters stand on their heads widely held beliefs (in our present) about the proclivities and habits of, and attitudes to, men and women. Alderman’s point in a nutshell, but perhaps a little too heavy-handed. Between each section of the book (which count down from the power’s first appearance to the Cataclysm) are illustrations of little understood artefacts from around the time described in the manuscript. The interpolation into the manuscript of seemingly intact “Archival documents relating to the electrostatic power, its origin, dispersal, and the possibility of a cure” also strains credibility. How could they have survived more or less intact, remaining understandable, when the illustrated artefacts did not? Moreover the manuscript itself is too close to present day speech patterns – especially in the character of Roxy – to make the framing device believable. A five thousand year hence Neil Adam Armon would have got so much of our present wrong that he actually gets right. From this point of view it might have been better just to present the story as speculation rather than an imagined history from the future. This is a very purist position, of course, which argues for every detail of the overall book to be true to its own reality as presented to the reader - and very difficult to bring off. And anyway, SF is always about the present, never the future (or in this case the manuscript’s distant past.) I also doubt whether the inhabitants of such a world would in fact call the historical break a cataclysm but all this is mere quibbling. Though its interpretation of human nature, power and how it is implemented is bleak, The Power is engrossing, well written and with a lot to say about relationships between the sexes.
Let's be clear: this is speculative fiction that looks toward the near future and is drawn straight from today's very real gender dynamics. In the book, teenage girls and women manifest the power to produce electricity in their bodies sufficient to electrocute -- you might imagine that such power turns society on its head, and it is that upheaval that the novel follows. It's also set up a book-within-a-book, with far future citizens looking back at what would be our near future and arguing amongst themselves about what's true in their history. That very set up creates enough distance to make even the more violent scenarios of the internal story fascinating in context.
A friend of mine told me that there are two camps of people who read this book: those who think it should be viewed purely as a meditation on the absolute corruption of power (which, on many levels, it definitely is) and those who finish the book with the phrase "Burn it all down" on their lips. I leave you to decide which camp you are in, but I'm telling you that you need to read this book. The very last line of the very last far-future letter puts the entire novel in perspective -- when you read it, it will hit you. Amazing. Seriously.
Women gain powers and use them to control, bully, maim, kill men. Hello dystopia, my old friend.
I found it hard to connect with the characters. The strongest passages were when she was writing about how Tunde felt
It turns out that power corrupts women just as much as it corrupts men and a female-dominated society isn’t the benevolent matriarchy one might imagine. It’s an interesting thought experiment that Alderman engages in. She does so with nuance and a touch of dark humor. Once I finished, I immediately wanted to read it again because I know I’ll get even more out of it when I know where the story is headed. We read this book for one of my book clubs and there was a lot to talk about – it makes for a great discussion. My book club is all-female – I’d be really interested in what male readers think of it. I’m guessing most would find it pretty eye-opening. Highly recommended.
I found the idea to be powerful, but unfortunately I found the execution weak. What the women do with this new-found power might be partially realistic, but I found it disappointing. There is a lot of violence and not a lot of exploration of the intellectual side of what this physical power could mean. I also thought the characters she chose to create and develop did a disservice to what could have happened.
In short, I wish someone would try again with this premise but different characters, thematic exploration, and outcomes.
In the near future, in a very recognizable world, girls and then women, discover a hidden “power” that gives them the ability to shock and if desired...kill, notably abusive men. Yep, the tables have turned and this makes for
Told in alternating chapters, from different character viewpoints, the novel unfolds, in funny and biting ways. It is not as deep and introspective as The Handmaid's Tale but the author still offers plenty to chew on. I am not going to divulge anymore of the various plot-lines but I was highly entertained and give it a strong recommendation.
*This is also a terrific audiobook, if you want to go that route.
And also to remind myself that good books are great even though I expect them to be better. I just have to remember how bad the crappy ones are.
What is a woman? Whatever a man isn't."
This book is set up as a book written by a male historian in the far future when women dominate men and rule the world. The male historian believes that a world ruled by men would be kinder and
Almost simultaneously around the world women developed a "power" that enabled them to debilitate or even kill whoever they aim this power, which is similar to an electric shock, at. At first, many women don't know how to use this power, and many of those that do know how are reluctant to use it, but eventually there are wars etc. as women seize leadership roles. The story is told through the experiences of several characters, including Roxie, the daughter of a British crime family, Allie, an American teenager who reinvents herself as Eve, a faith healer and head of a religious movement that spreads worldwide, Margot, a politician who develops training camps to teach young women to use the power, Jocelyn, Margot's daughter, and a soldier in the women's army, and Tunde, a male Nigerian reporter who travels the world, at great risk to himself, to report on the cataclysm occurring as women begin using their power.
This was an interesting and thought-provoking work. I recommend it.
3 1/2 sta
So much for the premise, what about the story? The action of the novel takes place in the period between the emergence of the power, and the arrival of the Cataclysm, and is traced through the experiences of five principal characters. There is a lot that is good about it as a novel. The characters are vividly drawn and (in the strange context in which they exist) believable enough to get you rooting for them. The prose is crisp and forcefull, and there is a strong element of very dark humor. The plot (and subplots) are compelling. For most of the book, this was enough to keep me reading with great interest and attention. Towards the end, however, as the change moves into the geopolitical realm, the momentum sags. The plot becomes confusing and diffused, major characters are left in limbo, and I had to push myself to finish. This is a very good book, and a good read, but for me it least it doesn't measure up to "The Handmaid's Tale", to which it is frequently compared. Read it for what it is.
The premise of this book is that a substance released during World War II has been bioaccumulating in humans (and other inhabitants of the earth). This substance has triggered a genetic change in females that allows them to deliver a shock with their hands. It is first discovered by girls who pass along their discovery to others so that eventually almost all women born since World War II have the ability. Now women have the ability to disable or even kill attackers. One of the first to use her power to kill is Allie and the man she kills is her foster father who has been sexually abusing her. Allie realizes she must get away. After some time she reaches a convent on the east coast in which the nuns give her and other girls shelter. Allie hears a voice in her head which counsels her how to handle herself. She founds a new religious cult, in which she is called Mother Eve, and soon has the attention of the US government and other entities. Just as in the old saying that power corrupts some women use their ability to treat men just as badly as women were treated by men. Allie is dismayed by the way the power has corrupted many women and searches for a way to turn things around but it's not easy.
My library didn't categorize this book as science fiction but that's the genre I would put it in. It certainly portrays a dystopian world that is based on possibilities known at this time.
I'm not entirely sure how things got from the framing story from the current pieces but it pulled me in and kept me reading and I really did enjoy the ride and could see how it really did reflect reality.
Note
This is not a YA book due to scenes of brutal sexual violence.
The writing here is full of pace and happenstance. The characters are thinly drawn, but no more so than one might expect in a heavily plot-driven novel. Chance seems to play a part in how the characters eventually cross paths. But it also might be an unexplained further element, a voice that speaks to more than one of the characters, possibly generated by the skein itself, which seems to guide at least some of the action.
It’s very “readable,” as a number of blurb writers on the copy I had noted. But I wonder whether there is much more here than an initial conceit played out under a number of different conditions, one for each of the principal characters. Once you entertain the idea that the world might be substantially different if women had some physical attribute that conferred on them significantly greater “power” than even the strongest man, is there any more to it? Yes, the world would be different. In this case, it goes all Hobbesian, and becomes nasty, brutish, and short, the war of all against all. I suppose that’s one possibility. If you’ve read the setup on the cover flap of the novel, you pretty much have all you need.
For me, the frame, which casts this as an “historical” novel set some five thousands years in the past, was unnecessary. I thought it subtracted more than it added. However, I suppose such a frame is a trope in this kind of speculative fiction, so this is a minor quibble.