Reading: The Power

I bought Naomi Alderman's The Power more because I thought it was a book I ought to read (sf that won a literary prize, hailed as a feminist classic and the new The Handmaid's Tale) than because I particularly wanted to read it, and I read it because when I turned my Kindle on at the weekend it was already open (it's the top book on page 2 of the index, so I presume I opened it by mistake).

I read Alderman's The Lessons a few years ago and thought it was OK, but not stunning. I feel much the same about The Power; both books are competently written (albeit in a style which is functional rather than beautiful) and reasonably engaging, but wearing its influences very visibly (for The Lessons, mostly Brideshead Revisited; for The Power, Atwood, the feminist sf of the 1980s and, I think, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and ultimately rather soulless.

Although The Lessons was literary fiction, The Power is definitely sf; it deals with the ten years or so following the revelation that, in a world otherwise very like our own, women have suddenly developed the ability to deliver electric shocks, rather in the manner of electric eels, and the resulting changes in society as the "weaker" sex becomes the stronger. However, like a lot of more "literary" sf, it uses its sf tropes to paint a very bleak and cheerless picture. Alderman chooses four main point of view characters: an ambitious politician, an abuse victim who becomes a kind of new Messiah, the daughter of a London gang boss following in her father's footsteps, and a YouTube journalist who dedicates his life to documenting the change in the world. None of them are particularly sympathetic characters to start with and as one of the novel's main themes is the corrupting influence of power they only get less sympathetic as the narrative goes on, while the world around them exchanges patriarchal repression and toxic masculinity for an equally toxic matriarchy. It's definitely not a book that appears to have room for any kind of optimism or hope about humanity. It also has a lot of quite graphic violence and descriptions of abuse, which made it a fairly grim read.

I also had a few gripes about the novel's feminist credentials. While I can see that the novel's use of the abuses of the reversed world to point out the appalling treatment of women in too much of the modern world could be considered to be feminist, the suggestion that if women were stronger than men they would treat them in exactly the same way as men have treated women over the centuries is not one that I would consider to be a feminist position. (ETA for clarity - partly because this is a sentiment I associate much more with anti-feminist rhetoric, but also because I think feminism is about removing the power differential between the genders, not reversing it, so I don't see a novel based around a reversed dynamic as necessarily a feminist novel.) Also, Alderman's decision to have the power linked to a hitherto-unnoticed quirk of female biology* means that the exploration of gender roles is very firmly linked to biological sex, and although there are hints of things beyond that (there are mentions of boys and men who also have the organ responsible for the power, and the possibility of transplant operations) the novel doesn't really examine the ramifications.

I thought it was OK, but I didn't think it was as good as popular opinion seemed to have it, and I didn't particularly enjoy it myself.

* although I strongly suspect one of her influences to have been the rather more mystical empowerment of women at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 'Chosen'