Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!
The Power (2017)
Author: Naomi Alderman
Pages: 400 (Kindle)
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Why I nominated this for book club: July was the month I asked my fellow July babies what was on their to-be-read lists. This one was nominated by my friend Kelly, born July 9.
Premise:
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.
Obvious spoiler warning for a post where we discuss a book we should have all read.
Discussion: Listen, I’m going to have to start this discussion in a sad place, but I just didn’t like this book. I still can’t tell if I’m reading too much into it or not enough, but by the end it felt like a parody of itself, and I couldn’t tell what the thesis of the book was.
The framing of it gives particular pause and makes the world building a bit sketchy. For instance, the man writing the historical fiction that makes up the main part of the book has diagrams that confuse a bitten fruit product (an ipad is pictured, Loc 3120) with something like a plate but in the main manuscript understands email and smart phones. How?
And the message that the framework provides is . . . troubling.
I liked where I thought the book was going in the beginning, when I read passages like this:
Something’s happening. The blood is pounding in her ears. A prickling feeling is spreading along her back, over her shoulders, along her collarbone. It’s saying: you can do it. It’s saying: you’re strong. (Loc 153)
As Allie (later Eve) first comes into her power. Girls awakening, girls realizing they have the ability to defend themselves, to keep themselves safe, to not have to worry. I was even with it when we got here:
It had been sparked by the death of two girls, about twelve years old. An uncle had found them practicing their devilry together; a religious man, he had summoned his friends, and the girls had struggled against their punishment and somehow they had both ended up beaten to death. And the neighbors saw and heard. And—who can say why these things happen on Thursday, when the same events might have gone unremarked on Tuesday?—they fought back. A dozen women turned into a hundred. A hundred into a thousand. The police retreated. The women shouted; some made placards. They understood their strength, all at once. (Loc 832)
Because, you know, justice. But then by the end we’re here:
There have been staring eyes in the dark, but there are no shrieks now. There is no rage. The men are quiet. Over on the other side of the camp there are still women fighting the invaders to drive them back, and there are still men picking up rocks or pieces of metal to hurt the women with. But here, those who saw it make no sound. (Loc 4087)
Where women are raping and pillaging and murdering a camp full of people just because they can. Because they’re bored. Because they have the power to. And we were always headed here, just based on the framework of the novel and the opening and closing letters and the diagrams talking about the Cataclysm. We were always headed toward disaster.
Like, is the idea that if given the ability and the power, women will completely screw the entire world up in less than 10 years? Is every woman secretly just itching at the chance to rape a guy? Because that’s kind of what it seemed like, by the end. Is it a parody? Is the idea that the IDEA that women would do this the part that’s ridiculous?
In conclusion: If the thesis is that women just want to watch the world burn to set up a society that looks exactly like the one we’re in only gender swapped, then I’m not particularly interested, and I don’t particularly understand the point of this book.
My take on it is that she’s saying that power corrupts, no matter who holds the power. By showing how power corrupts women when they have it, Naomi Alderman is demonstrating how having the power of physical strength corrupts men who have it. In our world, not every man is physically stronger than every woman, but enough are that it affects the whole structure of society. By reversing which gender is stronger and showing how that affects both women and men, the book is trying to show how men’s physical strength in our world works insidiously to affect everything.
It’s an interesting question: Are women innately less likely to be abusive, when they have power over men and society accommodates women having that power? If you say yes to that question, you’re saying men and women are different and act differently based purely on their gender, and I have some issues with that.
On the other hand, it is really hard to read about the world tumbling into women-led violence and hard to believe that it would get that bad in ten years. Surely after centuries in power, men would fight back with technology and the military. I have trouble believing that Tatiana could withstand tanks rolling in to her country.
I also don’t believe that women would all of a sudden throw off centuries of conditioning to make them caretakers and nurturers, and become violent criminals, just because they could. It seems more likely that society would change over centuries and not this radically over ten years.
Also N.B. I have not quite finished the book. I am just starting the last section “Here it Comes” so I don’t know how the book ends yet.