Review: The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel has a magnificent premise. It’s a premise on the order of Gulliver’s Travels or Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” It’s the kind of premise that allows you to see through a lot of the contradictions of our culture, that strips away the familiar and leaves you looking at possibilities that didn’t seem to exist before it. It’s the kind of premise that could conceivably give birth to multiple novels and short stories, all taking it in different and provocative directions.

The problem is, Naomi Alderman has given us multiple novels at the same time.

Alderman imagines a world in which women have developed the power to transmit electricity through touch. They can deliver paralyzing and even fatal charges that render them, all at once, the stronger gender. In the span of several years, men go from being implicitly in control – thanks to their larger muscles – to dependent, based on the fact that they would lose in physical encounters with most women.

Parts of this story deal with the personal level. We see young women who, discovering what they can do, take control of their lives, measure the emptiness of revenge, and deal with the complications of romantic relationships shaped differently from the ones they’ve been schooled to expect. (Think of much of the Jocelyn story here.)

Parts deal with the cultural. We see women pushing for notions of gender equality with greater power behind them. They don’t have to settle for the role of ‘little sister’ or ‘dependent girlfriend.’ They can take over and run things like the men who ran them before them. (Think of Roxy.)

Parts deal with the geo-political. We see, for instance, the rise of a new nation headed by the angry and ambitious Tatiana, and we see Margot building a political and business consortium that allows her to become one of the United States’ most influential politicians.

Parts deal with greater and deeper anger. Allie, who reconceives herself as “Eve,” nurtures an increasingly apocalyptic vision in which she reinterprets traditional religious scripture as a mandate for women’s superiority, can never escape the shadow of the sexual abuse she experienced as an adolescent.

And parts deal with meta-narrative in which we see the events of the novel as the imagined reconstruction of a time of upheaval as reconstructed by a man 5000 years in the future. He’s trying in his work to question the, by that time, implicit understanding that women dominate men.

I wish Alderman had picked one of those stories to explore and broaden. Any one of them would likely have been powerful. Instead, it’s as if she’s taken a plate full at a story buffet. Like an analogous plate at a Chinese restaurant, the result is promising flavors that bleed into each other. There are different places that look as if they’d make a full and memorable meal, but there’s no opportunity to enjoy the full experience of any of them.

The clash of impulses shows up in many places. For one, most sections of the novel come to us in conventional (and effective) ways as present tense. We see characters respond to changing events and grow with new experiences. It’s “novel” in the sense that it seems to be working toward the new, toward a surprise discovery. At the same time, though, we’re supposed to accept the frame narrative that the entire story is the product of an archeologist historian so unfamiliar with our world that he can’t conceive of large scale issues like sexism or Christianity as we know it. At a level of representation, it simply doesn’t work. I’d like to read the novel that results in the confusion that Alderman exploits – that she exploits with real effectiveness in the closing exchange of letters in the final chapter, for instance – but that’s not the one she’s written. Given what we know of our future historian’s ignorance, there’s no way he could have known enough to write the larger story we’ve received from such a personal perspective.

Or, for instance, there’s the clash of scale. Much of this deals with the sort of narrative I expected when I first heard the premise. We see women, or really girls, who discover what it means to be powerful, who discover what it means to own a privilege contemporary women know to be denied them. We see characters like Jocelyn negotiating those changed sexual politics as their strength subtly shifts a balance that is, for purposes of their story, real but invisible. At the same time as individuals struggle for a fuller sense of self, though, we learn about other women who have taken over the government. These women have skipped the personal politics and gone straight for all-out war. I care about Jocelyn, but there’s only so much I can care when others have cultivated their strength to the point that armies are on the move. There’s simply a contradiction in the way we’re called upon to see the simultaneous effects of the power.

And, even at the level of the premise, there’s the question of what’s happening. This begins, as we see it primarily through Allie/Eve’s eyes as a mystical experience. It’s moving to sense that the power has emerged from millennia of repressed hurt and anger. Women deserve this power as something that can allow them to make amends for a sexism that stretches back to our animal origins. Somewhere around halfway, though, the mysticism gets pushed back as scientific explanations begin to predominate. It’s less a mystical notion than a physical one, and scientists identify an organ, “the skein,” as a bundle of nerves running through a woman’s collarbone, as the explanation for what’s going on. Unlikely men – a group of Jewish gangsters – come to understand the anatomy well enough that they can even surgically remove one skein and implant it into a man. I find that change in tone, that surrendering of the mystical, righteous anger that gave birth to one idea of the power, as much a sci-fi mistake as it was for the “first” Star Wars trilogy to reduce “the force” to something called midichlorians in the blood stream. It’s not just lazy storytelling; it’s also a diminishment of what made the work evocative in the first place.

There’s much to admire in what’s here sporadically, and I have a sense it might work very well in the apparently in-production large-scale television series that may come of it. Given a larger canvas – and, I trust, with the awkward framing device removed – it will be something to see the unfolding of a new culture as women establish themselves as the more powerful gender. I won’t forget the premise, but I will forget most of the confused and contradictory strands of the stor(ies) that emerge in this version of it.


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