Book 37 The Power

 

The Power by Naomi Alderman fulfills the category “Book About or Set in a Non-Patriarchal Society” for the PopSugar 2022 Reading Challenge. 

The Power begins in our patriarchal world. Then women learn about a hidden power within them and the tables start to turn.

I’ll be honest. There will be big spoilers. I can’t review it without telling everything, including the ending. Don’t read my blog post if you plan to read the book. I’m spilling all.

I didn’t care for this one. Not because of the writing, pace, or characters. I found the author did an excellent job of building the conflict through multiple characters. The pace was perfect. It’s the material that made me stabby.

In the novel, women discover they have a latent superpower. Through the “sea ape” theory of evolution (man came from the sea), some environmental pollution, and thousands of years of repression, women discover they can produce electricity at will. The ability is similar to an electric eel, in how they use it for defense, manipulation, and offense. Women can show each other how to harness the electricity.

The book shows many ways the women use the power–to punish, to retaliate, to free themselves, to lord over others. The women whose stories we follow many times abuse their new power and use it for ill.

Not everyone. Some women try to find a new place in the world where they don’t have to fear men. They save themselves and others.

The point of the novel is Power Corrupts, and almost every character is a victim. They use and abuse their new power through violence, politics, or simple manipulation. And it happens fast. Within ten or so years of women learning to use their electrical ability, the world is victim to nuclear war. All because of the women’s abuse of power–whether political, religious, or militant. 

That bothered me. I thought it was interesting to see how different women used their power to get ahead, gain dominion, or even take over. I liked their stories, but it all moved too fast. But to say that the world could only handle the reversal of power between men and women for ten years before nuclear destruction?

Maybe, or maybe not.

I realize men would not easily give up their seats of power. To have women tear everything down so quickly is a little insulting. Yes, the electrical power is a weapon. Someone holding a gun all the time would be scary and nerve-wracking. Yes, many people would abuse it. But global destruction? I don’t know. I would hope we are better than that. 

The book also had some seriously tough scenes. Rapes abound in the novel, and I wouldn’t recommend the novel to anyone who is triggered by the topic. The men are abused with the women’s new power, but men retaliate as well. It’s a hideous picture of humanity.

And here’s another huge spoiler. In the end, it’s revealed the entire story is a novel written in the future under a matriarchal society. The women in his society have the electrical power, and his novel is a fictional history of ancient times when the women first discover their power. So it’s a book by a man telling how women destroyed the planet. Sigh… Yes, the actual author is a woman, and the plot twist here is clever, but I was done before I got there.

I give The Power by Naomi Alderman Four Electric Eels because it’s well-written and interesting. I just didn’t care for the path the story rode down.