The Power

What happens when an oppressed people suddenly gain a huge amount of power over their oppressors? What would a truly matriarchal global society look like? Are men and women born with certain inherent characteristics, or are they the result of social conditioning (surely we can agree that one’s stupid, right)? What if women were the physically stronger sex?

These questions, and more, are explored in Naomi Alderman’s new novel. The premise is a deceptively simple one: what if women in our current world spontaneously developed the ability to wound or even kill men at will? From there the novel branches into a number of intertwining plot lines that explore the possible consequences, which are, as with all good speculative fiction, as complex and varied as the individual characters. There’s a gangster’s daughter; an abused foster child; the mayor of an anonymous US city; the first lady of an Eastern European nation; and a Nigerian journalist, the only significant male character, and one of the first to take seriously and begin to document the effect of the power on political structures.

Alderman has made a significant choice in setting her novel in our world, rather than inventing a new one in which women have always been powerful. A key element of the plot is the righteous fury of the female characters, both the central ensemble and the background players. The first large-scale riot we witness takes place in Saudi Arabia, and the first matriarchal government to emerge is in Moldova, the sex trafficking capital of Europe. (Side note: if you type “Moldova” into Google, the first prompt is “Moldova women”; if you enter that, the FIRST HIT is titled, “Are Moldovan women easy?” and the excerpt begins, “Moldovan women do not respect themselves. Whom should woman be to stay at 3 am on the intersection under the traffic lights for 15 minutes waiting for a …” That’s where it ends and I’m not clicking on it, are you?)

According to Alderman, she’s received a lot of criticism from people who think she’s a misogynist, presumably for the same reason that Jonathan Swift’s public was shocked by his endorsement of baby meat. Such readers ignore the fact that no outrage is committed by women in this novel that is not perpetrated against women by men in our current world, and, indeed, that the female characters who commit them have learned their behaviours from the men in their lives. Alderman is talking about two things: she’s talking about men, and she’s talking about power. The skein, the new organ developed by the women, is a fairly transparent penis metaphor. The language used by the women, the micro-aggressions, the patronising (or I guess matronising?) of men, could all be directly lifted from my daily experiences and those of women that I know. There’s even a frame narrative in which a male novelist in the future is getting his female mentor (also named Naomi – too much?) to give him feedback, and both her well-meaning condescension and his self-doubt are pitch-perfect.

As for power, its abuses are familiar, and in the novel they take many forms: capitalist exploitation, political gain, internet fame, cult leadership, criminal enterprise, old-fashioned rape. If I have criticism, it’s that the novel becomes a little heavy-handed when it comes to that last one: he was asking for it, what was he doing out by himself. At moments like that I always come back to the wisdom of Virginia Woolf: if you make an argument rationally, the reader thinks of the argument. If you make it emotionally, the reader thinks of the author. Of course Alderman has every right to be angry, as do we all, but she let her anger show a little too much in those sections, and it took me out of the story for a moment.

This novel certainly made me feel a lot of feelings. Here’s one interesting thing I didn’t previously know about myself: there’s a part of me that would quite like it if men knew what it was like to be afraid to walk around by themselves at night. It isn’t a perfect novel by any means, but nor is it a mere thought experiment. The characters feel inhabited, giving the novel an emotional truth at its core that lifts it above what a less skillful author might have achieved with the same basic elements.

Trigger warnings: rape, domestic violence, general violence