Title: The Power
Author: Naomi Alderman
Genre: Science fiction, fantasy, dystopian
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Publication Date: October 2017
Format: Audiobook
Length: 12 hours

Rating:

A friend of mine was reading The Power with her book club and reached out to recommend it to me as one she thought I’d like. I’m so grateful whenever people think of me while reading because more often than not, I find they’re spot on in finding me a book that’s enjoyable and that I might not have discovered on my own.

The Power was a fantastic book. It reads like a dystopian novel but is so aligned with actual societal issues that you very overtly feel the relevant social commentary. I found the characters to be flawed and fascinating, the plot to be full of tension and a degree of unpredictability, and the narration on audio was one of the best ones I’ve listened to yet. Most significantly though, I felt like this book left a real impression on me. I was thinking about the real-life parallels the whole time through as I listened and now, a week later, they’re still running through my head.

A book that doesn’t leave me the moment I’ve finished? I’d call it a very solid read, and an entertaining listen.

The Book: The Power by Naomi Alderman

The Power follows several core, main characters from various regions through a world very much like our own, with the exception that here, girls have come into a significant biological evolution that allows them to harness electricity through a skein in their skin. Each character, who are all women except for one man named Tunde who follows the change as a reporter travelling the world, demonstrates how this power dramatically changes their circumstances. They all go from women who are either abused, abandoned, or forced into inferior positions by men, to being the ones wielding disproportionate amounts of power over the men who had made their lives miserable. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that what initially seems like a small change to one sex’s abilities quickly flips society on its head.

As the women all find different ways to harness and own their power, the world begins to dramatically shift. Alderman uses these changes to explore aspects of human nature, societal discrimination and structure, and ultimately, power.

The Review

The Power unfolds over two parts. The first focuses on what would happen if women had unmatched physical power over men. How would that flip society on its head? How would that change these dynamics between genders that have been the subject of struggle and social upheaval for centuries?

In the second half of the novel, Alderman explores power dynamics more generally. Is it inevitable that a mismatch in power means that power will always be abused? Are people inherently cruel and it’s just a matter of who has the upper hand? Do we always devolve into cruel and abhorrent ways when there’s an option to do so without repercussions?

I did a lot of thinking while I was reading this book. In ways, as some of the more extreme events are unfolding, you want to think that things like this would never happen, that in this dystopian society, everything is just dialled up to 100 and people couldn’t be that cruel, but so much of the narrative parallels actual crimes, events, and systemic issues that women have faced for generations. The sexual assaults and manipulations feel horrific and jarring, but in reverse, women have been dealing with many of these exact scenarios for as long as anyone can remember. There are several particularly powerful references to “male genital mutilation” that seemed truly terrible, and yet they were also exact mirrors of what some women still face today.

Alderman creates this vicious world where women are out for vengeance and over time, they rewrite history altogether. They flip their masculine cultures on their head and reposition women as symbols of strength and power, but it takes a supernatural power imbalance for women to be able to pull it off. It’s shocking and also familiar in the worst ways, how much radicalism it can take to fight back against a history of misogyny and anti-feminist rhetoric. Of course, in The Power, it goes too far, and women swing over to serving as the new oppressors, but particularly in the first half of the book you’re acutely aware of just how much power it takes to begin to overthrow the patriarchal nature of the societies where women feel oppressed.

The other aspect I found well executed in this book was the demonstration of the biases inherent in historical recollections. So often, history is written by the victors, plagued with opinions masquerading as fact by the authors. The dialogue at the end of the book makes that clear as Neil tries to argue that it was possible that men were not always the “weaker sex” despite what their histories have recorded. He notes the presence of archaeological evidence and the absence of evidence that goes past what they refer to as the cataclysm, and it’s really interesting to see his female colleague poke holes in his theories and insist that it’s a preposterous and grandiose idea at best.

Alderman writes about oppression and gender in such a unique, direct way, using this kind of sensationalized reversal of history to make clear how outraged we should be with what’s been perpetrated in the name of power dynamics. I loved how this narrative played out, it was clever and interesting and had so much tension that I was hooked from the very start.

I would highly recommend this book to those interested in dystopian and sci-fi, with a heavy dose of power dynamics, politics, and gender discrimination. It was both entertaining and thought-provoking and it’s a premise that I think will stick with me.