June 2020: The Power (Alderman)

Post date: Jul 07, 2020 3:12:36 AM

Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power is a work of dystopian science fiction that imagines a world where women suddenly become the more physically powerful sex. Perhaps due to an environmental contaminant, young women develop a skein across their collarbones that allows them to dispense large amounts of electricity with their touch. The young women discover that they can awaken this power in older women, and soon almost all the world’s females acquire the ability to incapacitate or kill anyone who threatens them. The consequences of this change in power dynamics are extensive, leading to acts of self-defense and unprovoked aggression and, eventually, to large scale political revolt and violent backlash. Told from the point of view of five different characters (four women and one man), the novel explores the nature and dangers of power, as we watch society slowly transform and collapse.

Alderman’s novel made a big impression when it came out in 2017. It made it to The New York Times’ best seller list, was praised by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Barack Obama, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK, and was greenlighted to be turned into a television series by Amazon. Perhaps this is not surprising. In 2017, dystopian fiction was all the rage. The election of Trump and the spread of populist movements around the world had prompted heightened interest in the genre. This was perhaps most visible in the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the success of the tv series that it inspired. However, it also fueled increased attention on the expanding category of young adult, dystopian science fiction, much of which is marketed to girls. (I know that my four nieces were reading little else at the time.) In this context, Alderman’s novel was praised (and also criticized) for exploring themes concerning power, exploitation and sexual violence that assumed that men and women would be equally abusive given the opportunity. In fact, Alderman insisted that her novel is only as dystopian as our current society is, since she did not describe women doing anything to men in the novel that is not already being done to women. By calling attention to this fact, Alderman hoped, we will rethink the power imbalances that characterize our society and question whether or not we can find ways to address them, ways that don’t simply replace them with different inequities.

Given these themes, I figured this would be a book that our members would find interesting. However, what a difference a pandemic makes! The book is strikingly dark and violent, and many of us found we were simply not in the mood for such material, given the stress and challenges characterizing our current situation. We want to escape, many noted, and not to a dystopian world full of physical and sexual violence. This made it a tough book for many to finish, and I have to admit I wouldn’t recommend that you rush out to read it, if you find these times are dark enough as it is.

Given this initial reaction, I feared we would not have much to say about the book. However, in the end we had quite a good discussion. Even without the pandemic as a background, some insisted that they would have found the book too violent and its points too heavy handed. Others praised the book’s more subtle qualities, noting that Alderman is often quite clever in the ways she turns patriarchy on its head and finds parallel ways for the new matriarchy to exploit its tools and methods. For example, in an afterword set thousands of years in the future, a female intellectual casually appeals to evolutionary science to justify the claim that women must always have been the more powerful gender.

Overall, reactions were more mixed with this book than with most of the books we have read recently. There was a big divide in the group between those who thought that women would not abuse their newly found powers in the ways that Alderman describes and those who thought she had gotten human nature just about right. Some were frustrated that almost all the main characters become anti-heroes, making morally questionable and psychologically disturbing decisions. Some thought this made the them caricatures and made the book’s themes too simplistic. Others disagreed, pointing to numerous individual moments that made the characters highly relatable and sympathetic. People do both good and bad things, morality is complicated. Sometimes there are no obvious good guys or clear answers.

I know some of our members would disagree, but in the end, I would say that The Power deserves the praise and recognition that has received. If you can tolerate the novel’s explicit descriptions of sexual and physical violence, then it can provide an evocative catalyst for discussions about the nature of power and of human beings. As Alderman stated in her interview with the BBC’s World Book Club (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csyx6g), if you think she has gotten these things wrong, then that’s okay. At least, in disagreeing with her, you will have thought them through. With our current global health crisis and with the increasing attention being paid to long-standing societal power imbalances, perhaps more conversations about people and power are long overdue.