For the past couple of years, I’ve set a target 
of how many books I’d like to read over the year. That target has averaged out at 25, a number that seems low until you consider the fact that I only count non-work books and that a large part of my job involves reading. I don’t often have time to sit down for a long reading session, and so many of the books I read are either easily split into chunks (e.g. books of essays) or ones that I find especially easy to read – in my case, usually crime fiction (Rebus and Arkady Renko being favourites) or fantasy (this year, Earthsea and Pratchett dominated.
So when I find a book that I consider more in the ‘literary fiction’ category, I try to save it for a time when I’ll be able to devote longer reading sessions to it, which I why I didn’t get around to The Power by Naomi Alderman, about which I’d heard a lot of good things, until the Christmas break. It was worth the wait, and I devoured it in under three days. This science-fiction novel tells the story of the moment when all the women in the world discover that they have the power to wield an electric-like force from their own bodies, allowing them to harm and even kill at will. This results in, amongst other things, female-led military, political, and religious movements attempting to topple the previously male-dominated power structures. The story is told from the perspective of several characters, most of them female, whose experiences with ‘the power’ vary and who employ it for different purposes. The consequences play out in the book’s timeline over several years, and echo into the more distant future, as well as into a clever frame narrative.
As is often the case with science-fiction stories, there are broader themes at play, and here, it’s clear the book’s title holds a double meaning – the novel is about the nature of power. Various forms of power are explored – the physical, certainly, but also the political and religious, as well as the power of being part of a movement, or the power held by events in one’s personal history. Several times, the novel uses the image of power as a tree, with a strong central trunk and branches that reach far and wide – and without giving too much away, the women of the novel find that the roots of the particular power structure they struggle against reach stronger and deeper than they expected.
Besides being a really fascinating look at the functioning of power, The Power is simply great storytelling. Alderman builds her world on top of our own in a manner reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (and Atwood’s endorsement appears on the jacket of Alderman’s novel). The characters are believable in their foibles and flaws, the twists and turns all struck me forcefully, and the violent scenes are rendered in visceral detail, pulling no punches – it would take the most bloody-minded of readers to interpret the book as endorsing female violence against men. The book is also interesting in the way it takes a global perspective, rather than focusing on an exclusively American (or, less frequently, British) context, as so many popular ‘dystopian’-style science fiction narratives do. This is certainly one for the Atwood fans, and I have a feeling it will be on many A level syllabuses before long.
A content note: the novel contains some scenes of strong violence and sexual assault.
