The Power

by Naomi Alderman

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

What if the power to hurt were in women's hands?

Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - teenage girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman's extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed.

• ISBN10: 0316547603
• ISBN13: 9780316547604
• Publish Date: 8 January 2019 (first published 27 October 2016)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Imprint: Back Bay Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 400
• Language: English

Reviews

[Bianca]

‪2019 Popsugar Reading Challenge‬
36. A book about someone with a superpower

It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

— Imagine a world where women have the power to physically hurt & destroy men, where men live in constant fear as women abuse them & violate their rights. This had an interesting premise, but poor execution.

[clq]

Note: in this review I say a bit about the very basic premise of the book, but not any more (and indeed quite a bit less) than literally every description and comment on the book I've read (including the main description here on Goodreads), and therefore I don't consider it to be a spoiler. If you have no idea whatsoever about what the book is about, don't read this review - as I think going into it completely blind could make for quite a different, and quite an interesting, experience of the first few chapters of the book.

I'm really conflicted about this book. I have a bunch of problems with it, but the problems are mainly rooted in my expectations of it.

Through various things I'd read about The Power I expected it to be a "What would the world look like if women were physically superior to men" kind of story, in a thought-provoking "See how shocking and unusual this looks when the genders are reversed?" kind of way. The book has elements of this - quite a lot of them - but ultimately this is not what the book is. I can't say much more about exactly how the book wasn't what I expected without spoiling anything, so I won't, but suffice to say I expected it to be a bit more explicitly feminist than it comes across, and it would have been interesting to read a story with this premise that was a feminist message with a story, rather than a story which was heavily feminist. That said, there are a few great, and genuinely thought-provoking passages on gender-role-reversal, but as brilliant they are, they seem almost a little out of place in a book where I really wish they didn't.

So, that's the "this book wasn't what I expected it to be" part over with - on to the book itself!

Despite the story not being interesting for the reasons I was expecting, it is still a very interesting story, and while it is, in a sense, all about gender, the story as a whole reads like a story of what can happen when the balance of power shifts from one group to another. In the context of the main story the fact that gender is the axis around which the power has shifted seems almost incidental. The book shows the discovery of the power, and how the world gradually adjusts - or doesn't - to the new status quo.

My problem with the story is that some of the characters we follow, and the actions they take, just don't seem viable. I'm perfectly happy to accept the premise of the book, but in a story where it seems like it would have been possible to make the characters entirely convincing, some of the actions that drive the story forward just don't seem viable to me. In a sense this is a compliment to the story: the reason I found it annoying at times was that I felt like the book was so close to getting this right. I feel that there are things that we could have learned about the characters, and some more nuance added to what they ended up doing, that could have made it all seem so much more viable without the story having to change.

Once I got into the book a little more, and got used to the way in which this story was going to be told, I started quite enjoying it. It didn't get everything exactly right for me, and quite a few times I felt like certain scenes could have gone on for longer. When the pace slowed down it could have reveled a little more in the quiet, and spent longer exploring the emotion that was present in many of those moments. When it became brutal (and at times it becomes quite brutal) I think it could have taken the brutality further. It really did stick the knife in, but I think it could have twisted the knife around, and been more explicit about some of the horror that the reader knows took place, but that remained between the lines. I think it would have suited the book to be more gratuitous, and not hold back at all, in some of the places where the horrific and uncomfortable nature of what was happening was the point of the scene.

I'm really struggling with the rating of this book. Had I gone into the story completely blind, I think I would have given it four out of five, and objectively I think that's what it probably deserves. However, as I try to rate all the books based on my subjective experience of it, I have to give it a three. I'm very happy to have read it, it was occasionally thought-provoking in a way where I felt my thoughts benefited from being provoked, and it's a really interesting read.

[teachergorman]

When I reached the end of this novel, I actually shouted out loud, cheering because it is such an amazibg triumph. As a writer, it also falls into the category of books that depress me a little because I know I will never write anything this good. Everyone, and I mean every single human being who can read English or any language into which this is translated, should read this. It will change the way you see the world.

[jamiereadthis]

A truly powerful book would still be lodged in my mind six months later, and this one wasn’t. (I waited to see if it would be.) But still, quite the read in the moment. I just hate that we need books like this to point out the obvious.

[inlibrisveritas]

3.5 or 4 Stars

Review to come.

[brokentune]

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent and the only important thing was - could you and your kin jolt harder? But we don't act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we've based our ideas on.
Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.

One of the most written-about books of 2017, and hailed as a modernised version of The Handmaid's Tale, I had very low expectations of The Power. I'm not a fan of dystopian fiction and I tend to avoid hyped-up books like the plague.
However, I am a sucker for a great cover and so this ended up on my shelves.

The biggest surprise was that I found quite a lot about this book that held great promise:

I loved the epistolary exchange between the two authors, Naomi and Neil, at the beginning and end of this book.

I loved the idea that the rise of the women was not due to a freak accident or a mutation, but was based on a power that had been there all along but had been, for want of a better word, forgotten.

I loved that Alderman based so much of her novel on current events.

I loved that there were male characters that were not horrible human beings. Well, okay, there was just one. But ... that is still one more than in many of Atwood's books.

I loved the snarky tone of Alderman's writing. Some of the dialogues and inner monologues was funny enough to make me smirk. Dripping with sarcasm, but it did make me smirk.

Where the book fell flat, however, was that once the premise had been established, the story didn't seem to go anywhere. Or not anywhere new. It just seemed to follow the same old path of mayhem and carnage that had already been established by both the MaddAddam trilogy and Butler's Parable of the Sower. In fact, the insertion of Biblical tone and phrases reminded me a lot of Parable of the Sower, and the fight scenes reminded so much of MaddAddam that I spent the second half of the book wishing it would end. This had already been done, and done better.

I really hoped that maybe. just maybe, this novel would have had the guts to dare to imagine the rebuilding of society after an apocalyptic event - the cataclysm in this book.

There are hints of this at the end of this book, but the story ends before it gets to develop this aspect. So, all we get is another iteration of Lord Acton's adage that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

So, while I really enjoyed the political side of this book that seeks to hold up a mirror to society with respect to the differential treatment of men and women, the execution of the actual story as a whole was disappointing.

[gmcgregor]

As a small woman, I can't remember the last time I was out in public without at least some baseline level of apprehension for my safety. I'm not walking around constantly terrified by any means, but I am just always aware that there's the possibility that I could be anything from verbally harassed to followed to grabbed. Most of my female friends feel the same way. It's just what it means to be a woman in the world. Naomi Alderman's The Power, though, imagines a different world entirely. It begins in the world as it exists, but there's a sudden change: women have developed an organ that generates electricity inside them, electricity they can shoot out through their hands. In a matter of weeks, the world goes from one in which men are the most powerful, physically and otherwise, to one where that balance isn't the same anymore. The Power changes everything.

Alderman explores this new world through four people: Roxy, the daughter of a British crime boss, whose Power is exceptionally strong; Allie, an abused teenage foster child who turns the voice she hears in her head into a new religious movement; Margot, an ambitious politician; and Tunde, the only man, a Nigerian journalist chronicling the changes in the world since the Power emerged. There's chaos, initially. No one knows what to do, what it all means. But things change quickly, all the way from men needing to learn how to protect themselves against violent women, to women dominating the military, to women toppling oppressive regimes. Eventually the storylines all converge in a fictional Eastern bloc country, now ruled by a woman as a dictator, that's the center of a proxy war between the powers-that-be in the old world against those of the new.

This is a fascinating idea to consider, how the world would change if something like what Alderman describes happens. And I think the failure of the book (as you can see from my rating, I didn't think it was especially good) comes from trying to capture too much. Roxy and Allie's perspectives dominate the book, and while I understand why Alderman included Tunde, to give an idea of what it would be like to come of age as a man in the world as we know it and live through the way it changes, I think Margot's storyline was weak and could have been cut to develop Tunde better. There's some good characterization going on with Roxy and Allie (particularly the former), but it's inconsistent, and it seems almost like Alderman was so excited to really dig into what she thought might happen in her new world that she didn't really think about the people who would be living in it beyond broad strokes.

That being said, it's an effective exploration of the way that power corrupts. At first, many women lash out at men in revenge for the ways they themselves have been hurt, which is an understandable reaction. The reader expects it to settle down after a while, after some wrongs have been righted, but it doesn't. Women begin to objectify the men around them, use their superior position to commit emotional and physical violence against them. While it's easy, living in the world we do live in, to imagine that women would wield large-scale power more effectively and humanely than men have and do, Alderman punches through that fantasy by remembering that women are, after all, human, and human beings do not have a great track record when it comes to the way we mistreat each other when given the opportunity to do so. I do think that as a novel, there are significant weaknesses, but as a piece to engage with intellectually, there's a lot to think and talk about here.

[sarahjay]

I am stunned. And frankly, I am livid that there is a quote on the back of this book from Cosmopolitan saying this is "The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid's Tale." Excuse me. No. It could easily be a companion piece to The Handmaid's Tale, so that comparison is much more apt, but in my view the only way it is similar to The Hunger Games is how both that trilogy and this book have humans in it. (This is not in any way a dig on The Hunger Games. Just saying that comparison is a ridiculous oversimplification of all three novels mentioned. Yes, I realize it was probably intended as a marketing ploy - "hey kids, this thing is like these other two popular things!" But it's insulting, really, because this book has no trouble standing on its own two feet. Anyway.)

This year I have, for maybe obvious reasons, been reading a lot of a genre I have been referring to in my head as "fucked up feminist dystopian fiction." I don't know that this is the healthiest way to respond to the current events of our time, but that is where I have sought my comfort. See, look, in this book there's a much worse car crash to stare at than the one on CNN! See, read about this apocalypse scenario, where the women get horribly abused and mistreated in varying ways by men gone mad with power, but in categorically WORSE ways than in real life, AND everyone has a plague or something. Find inspiration in these characters who overcome their circumstances by any means necessary. Take notes.

This one more than fits into that category, but I have still never read anything like this book. It flips everything. Live in this fantasy where women have super powers. Wish for that power, your own skein. Wish for that magic, the lightning at your fingers. We are all Stormcallers in this world. "She cuppeth the lightning in her hand. She commandeth it to strike." I want this tattoo on my collarbone. I want that power, I want to believe I'd use it right.

Does everything go perfectly? Well, it sure doesn't, folks. It is mesmerizing the whole time. It messes with your head. You start seeing and thinking about people differently. It turns you upside down. I was racing to finish it but I also never wanted it to end.

The last line, though. It was brilliant. The whole thing was.

I am going to be thinking about The Power for a very, very long time.

[luddite]

**Minor Spoilers**

What I liked about it: Exploring the relation between religion, myth-making, and power. And the smooth writing.

Other than that, there was so much lacking in this book. It's violent, deliberately so. But it doesn't do enough with its premise to explore the dynamics of the world it creates beyond the initial upheaval. The finale was quite disappointing for me; there's too much left to the imagination about what happens, when that's the critical element of the book.

Still, a fun read.

[Jo]

Originally published on Once Upon a Bookcase.

Trigger Warning: This book contains rape, of men and women.

I'm not one who reads general fiction, generally. I only discovered The Power by Naomi Alderman because it won the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. When I heard it was about teen girls getting power - literal, physical power - I had to get it. But I've finished it with mixed feelings. That's not to say The Power isn't a good book. It is a good book - it's a great book, even - I just don't think it's my kind of book.

The story starts with a letter from Neil Adam Armon, a historian, to Naomi Alderman. Neil is a historian, and he's sent his latest manuscript to Naomi to critique for him. He mentions that history books are often too dry for readers, and so with this book, he's decided to fictionalise history; 'Not quite history, not quite a novel. A sort of "novelization" of what archeologists agree is the most plausible narrative.' (p ix) What follows is Neil's history-in-story-form book, The Power - written thousands of years in the future, about events, that for us readers, could happen now, in our present. Figures from history in Neil and Naomi's time are characters in their own story, about how the everything changed in a global scale when, around the same time, teenage girls discovered they could produce electricity from their fingertips. How the power dynamics of the world changed when women had the power.

The Power is told over the span of ten years, from when teenage girls first discover their power, to when the world is changed completely, becoming unrecognisable as the world we know, to a world run by strong, vicious women with power. It's told from four different perspectives ; Reagan - whose father is the head of a criminal syndicate, whose power is woken when her mother is murdered by her father's rival - who becomes one of the strongest with her power; Tunde, a Nigerian guy who makes a name for himself as a journalist, going to dangerous parts of the world and reporting on how things are changing now women have the power; Allie, who comes to be known as Mother Eve, who hears a voice that guides her into creating a new religion, where God is known as Mother, not Father, where the women of the Bible are revered over all men (including Jesus) - a religion that overpowers all other religion, giving Allie political power as well as physical power; and Margot, a Mayor whose daughter's power is unpredictable, who has the power woken up in her, and uses the power for her own political gain.

This book is so, so very clever. It's pretty epic; it's such a big story in terms of plot - and is yet a single, stand alone novel of just 339 pages. It took my emotions on a roller coaster; at times, I was overwhelmed with a sense of rightness and pride when women were finally able to fight back against their abusers, against the people who set rules in other countries about how they should live their lives. Women who had been controlled and abused for so long - women who exist today in various parts of the world, because women are sex trafficked, and women in certain countries do not have the same rights as men, this book shining a light on how wrong our world is right now - taking back control and hurting those who hurt them. And then I would be absolutely staggered and disgusted at the treatment of men now women had control. There was a sense of women getting their own back, but after a while, it stopped being about revenge, and became a sick amusement. Women now had power, women now had control over men. They would abuse men for the fun of it, murder without a thought. It was horrific and so disturbing. Women become just as terrible as some men who exist today, and it's a widespread terribleness.

So yes, The Power is clever, and epic, and thought provoking, and highly disturbing in a good way. All of this I can say objectively. But subjectively, I can't really say I enjoyed it. The Power is so good, but I didn't enjoy it. Of course, there are some books that it seems weird to say you "enjoyed" them, when the subject matter isn't the best, but there is still a sense that you liked the book. I don't think I like The Power. And I can't say why exactly, because I was gripped, and I was amazed and awed by the story about it, and of course I would recommend it. I think my problem is I didn't like most of the characters, and while it's not always important to like the characters to like a book, for this book, for me, it is. Although I finished the book thinking "Wow!", I didn't finish the book feeling I had a positive reading experience. It's a strange one, because it's a book that will stick with me for a very long time, one I would highly recommend to everyone, but at the same time, I just know I didn't like it, and I won't be re-reading it. But again, it's important to point out that I didn't like it because the book is bad, because it's brilliant, my dislike is down to personal taste. Because this book is incredible. It's just not my book.