Naomi Alderman’s novel, The Power, is the story of what happened to the world when something happened, and all the girls who have had to endure the harassment, the touches, the rapes, are suddenly able to strike out, to stop their attackers in their tracks.
To a woman who has experienced sexual assault, this is like a massive wish fulfillment narrative. Just to have the idea that no man would ever dare to impose without consent is to imagine a different world. As Margaret Atwood once said (and I paraphrase here), when you ask men what scares them about women, they say it’s that women might laugh at them. When you ask women, they say it’s that men might kill them. Whole different orders of consequence. But if women develop a power to strike back, to defend, to kill, then we are on an equal footing. Women becoming truly dangerous means women can be as free as men. These are the first thoughts that come to me as I read The Power.
Then come other thoughts. About being dangerous women who have swallowed a lifetime of insult and insolence from men, who have bowed under the pressure and the fear, who have learned to smile, and smile, and never let them know how much it hurts, how much you hate what has been done to you, your mothers, your sisters, your daughters. About being dangerous women who no longer have to be afraid, who can turn the tables and make men feel fear for a change. Who can bring down the powerful men and destroy whole systems of male privilege. Who can seek revenge. Who can make men suffer for what they have done. These are uncomfortable thoughts. But they are also part of the picture Alderman paints.
And then there’s the curiosity factor. Suddenly you have a superpower. What can you do with it? How can you use it? Does it do more than hurt people? You want to explore what you can do, test it out. See who you are now that you have this strange new ability. This is a story about girls and women doing that, too.
The story of what happens when women gain this new and frightening power, of generating and directing bio-electricity, is told through a several viewpoints. There’s Tunde, a freelance journalist from Nigeria who was one of the first men to experience the shock of a woman who can say no to a suitor who’s just a little too eager, and back it up with power. Fascinated, possibly even fetishistically, Tunde is chronicling the actions of women around the world who are gathering together to take down misogynist systems and assume leadership. His apparent desire to give these women a platform to speak has so far saved him from further backlash at the hands of women liberating themselves.
And there’s Roxy, the daughter of a British gangster whose power emerged when a rival gang leader arranged to have her mother killed, but wasn’t strong enough to save her mother’s life. In the end she kills the man who gave that order, and her remaining family smuggle her out of the country to America.
And there’s Margot, the mayor of New York City, whose power is awakened by her teenaged daughter Jos. Margot is keeping her ability secret, because she can’t risk suspicion in the high-stakes game she’s playing to wrest political power from her long-time adversary, the state governor.
And strangest of all the stories, there’s Allie, now calling herself Eve. Allie has vague memories of being taken from her mother and moved from place to place, finally ending up as the foster daughter of a man who abuses her sexually while his wife turns up the sound on the TV to drown out her screams. Allie has a voice in her head, and that voice guides her to kill her rapist and make her way to a nunnery where other cast out girls have been taken in, and where Allie begins to start a new religion.
And of course there’s the framing story, about a daring “man writer” named Neil Adam Armon who has written a historical novel drawing on the best available archaeological research to tell a story about how his world came to be. He has sent his manuscript to a well-established writer, Naomi Alderman, for her opinion - and her “guidance.”
It’s a interesting look at how a new society, one where the power dynamic between the sexes has turned, could be formed - or imposed. Alderman tells the story from the perspective of three women who come to hold three very distinct forms of power - Margot has political power and connections to military power, Allie has religious power, and Roxy the power if the underworld, the illegal power networks of the world. Tunde has power, too, a power that serves them, the power of the media.
The Power is certainly well-written, and tells an interesting and emotionally powerful story. It speaks to me, as a woman, about very specific experiences, fears, nightmares and fantasies. I find myself wondering how it speaks to men. And I also think that, cathartic as it is, it is a rather old-fashioned entry in the very long history of speculative fiction centred on gender relations. Science fiction writers were producing these kinds of turn-the-tables stories a hundred years ago, depicting societies where women dominate men - sometimes with benevolence, sometimes with the same unthinking cruelty that has marked so many male-led societies. Within the genre, the most interesting work on gender has moved well beyond that kind of story, to look at ways of living without having one gender dominate another. We don’t need more revenge fantasies, but rather workable solutions, societies where equality is the key and no one holds the power over another.
Alderman has tapped into the current mindset, particularly now, in the year of #MeToo and #Time’sUp, and her book crackles with the anger of abused women everywhere saying “no more,” and it’s this that can lull the reader into a sense of approval for the changes we see, as women claim and use their new power. But before too long, it’s clear that Alderman’s novel is actually a cautionary takes about the way that power corrupts any group that holds it, that reminds us that when we engage in revolution without radical and structural change, what we get is a situation of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
In some ways, this can be seen as a profoundly anti-feminist work, taking as it does the position that we need such a cautionary tale to warn us that a society where a great power imbalance exists is a society that is dysfunctional. Certain men - particularly those who fear that without the ability to be stronger than women, they would have no power at all - have always framed feminism as a movement designed to place social supremacy in the hands of women. The Power suggests that their fears are realistic, that giving up power over means accepting subservience to.
In the end, I remain unsettled about the message of The Power. The point it makes is a valid one, that there is no good that comes from replacing one hegemony with another. But is it also saying that it’s something we can’t avoid? Can equality exist when one group has the real, measurable ability to do harm, to instill fear, to a greater degree? Is the ability of men to do so to women an insurmountable barrier to a truly just society? Can power exist and not be used?
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