Book Review: The Power (Naomi Alderman, 2016)

It’s interesting to note that writer Naomi Alderman was mentored by The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, and in that light The Power can be seen as something of a revenge fantasy with The Handmaid’s Tale as inspiration. It also leverages Atwood’s notion of the safe haven of a convent to nurture the development of an emerging power in women. What is this power? Teenage women start to discover an ability to generate electricity within their bodies which soon emerges as a weapon to free them from abusive men, and then find a way to connect older women to this power.

At first, the power is an instrument of revenge and liberation. Roxy Monke is the daughter of a London mob boss who gets even with the rival gangster responsible for the death of her mother. Allie Montgomery-Taylor is a young woman of color who kills her sexually abusive stepfather and becomes a runaway who eventually finds shelter in a convent. There she starts building a following of other young women who share this emerging capability and starts developing a woman-centric form of Christianity.

The plot then complicates as the power is also shown to corrupt. Margot Cleary is an American mayor with a daughter exhibiting aspects of the power, who develops her own formidable electrical talent which she uses to reach her political aspirations. She advocates North Star, an organization that runs training camps for young women ostensibly to control and subdue the power, but which soon becomes a mercenary weapon in her hands. Tatiana Moskalev is the former first lady of the Balkan country of Moldova, who seizes control and institutes regulations severely restricting the rights of males, a direct appropriation of laws subjugating women in some of today’s Islamic fundamentalist regimes.

Overseeing the worldwide unfolding of events is Tunde, a male Nigerian photojournalist who documents the spread of the power and its good and bad outcomes, both inspired by its liberating and equalizing aspects, yet terrified by the mob rule that he sees.

I had a few nit-picks with character inconsistencies near the end of the novel, and my interest was more drawn to the stories of Roxy and Tunde, two sympathetic people swept up in the awesome sweep of events, rather than the stories of Allie and Margot who are helping drive those events, and I’m not sure this was Alderman’s intent. Some plotlines feel unfinished.

All in all, this was a fast paced, fascinating read. Alderman hits home with her indictment of male-dominated society, yet this is not strictly a feminist tale – she hints that the women-run culture 5,000 years after a cataclysmic reset as being not necessarily better than what came before, having essentially replaced one “victor writes the story” skewed view of history with another.