Book Review: The Power, Naomi Alderman
Ursula K. Le Guin published The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, the peak of the Hippy moment, and the end of one of the most influential decades of American history. Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, smack in the middle of the Reagan presidency, in the year he first mentioned AIDs publicly, at the height of the crisis. It’s telling that The Power, by Naomi Alderman, came out in 2017, a year that will no doubt live in infamy.
Dystopian fiction has been all the rage for a long time now. It’s a simple metaphor — slip a STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER into a world that hates her and viola! Blockbuster book cooked in under ten minutes. Atwood, not Le Guin, could be called the grandmother of the trend, though I think it unfair to blame her for its laziness. The Handmaid’s Tale allowed Offred a little more complexity than, say, your Katniss Everdeens; but the structure of the form were there.
Le Guin, on the other hand, wrote a deeply philosophical novel. It focused less on the way societies police women’s bodies and more on what exactly gender is, its function, and how it influences lives of men and women. It’s hard to say one way is better than the other. I’ll admit that I like The Left Hand of Darkness better, but that’s just a matter of taste. The brutality, the boldness, the unflinching eye of The Handmaid’s Tale has resonated with readers for more than thirty years. There’s little doubt it’s a classic.
So where does The Power fall?
In Alderman’s acknowledgments she thanks Le Guin, but the book is dedicated to Atwood. Alderman was, in fact, a protege of Atwood’s. And yet — while I felt Atwood’s hand all over the novel, at its core, The Power has more to do with Le Guin’s deconstructionist tendencies than Atwood’s dystopian fantasies. There’s a question at the heart of The Power, under layers of humor, terror, and unblinking realism. It sits in the title itself: what is power? How does it work?
She tells us, early on, if we’re willing to believe her, that, “the shape of power is always the same”. But that’s a hard pill to swallow. We want to believe that power in the hands of the righteous would be righteous. And we always have wanted that. The novel begins with an inscription from the Book of Samuel:
“The people came to Samuel and said: Place a king over us, to guide us.
And Samuel said to them: This is what a King will do…he’ll take your sons and make them run with his chariots and horses. He’ll dispose them however he wants…
But the people would not listen to Samuel…(And) when Samuel heard what the people said, he told it to the Lord. The Lord answered, Give them a King”
This concept is central to the novel. We want to believe, so deeply, that power is and can be used for good. The novel’s speculative what if is, in itself, a reflection of that. What if all the women of the world gained the power to electrocute whomsoever they pleased? At first, it’s a very ra-ra-sis-boom-ba concept. Righteous women throwing off the shackles of patriarchal oppression, flexing their muscles for the first time, taking control of a world that’s treated them as second-class citizens since the Iron Age. We cheer them on, because of course we do. We pump our fists at the justice of the reversal. Alderman shows it to us through a number of eyes. Allie, a “mixed-race” foster child routinely sexually abused by her foster father burns him to a blackened, evil crisp. Roxy, the daughter of London gangster, finds her power too late to save her mother from the retribution of rival gangsters, but soon enough to rise in her father’s organization. Margot, the mayor of a mid-sized American city, belittled by her male superiors, finds that, “the power to hurt is a kind of wealth.” And then there’s Tunde, a Nigerian journalist and the only prominent male voice in the novel, who becomes an observer of this burgeoning epochal shift.
This conceit could easily have become a sort-of anti-Handmaid’s Tale. In the hands of a lesser writer, female hegemony could have looked beautiful, ideal, and peaceful. But Alderman’s hand is surer than that, her mind sharper, and her pen more humane. Of course there are plenty of clever reversals in the novel. Margot’s daughter notes that advertisements are now selling girls “one other thing; quietly, on the side. Be strong, they say, that’s how you get everything you want.” Margot thinks of a YouTuber, “how’s she supposed to take him seriously now, when she’s seen his broad shoulders and narrow waist and the rolling landscapes of obliques and delts”. And some of these reversals are cuter than others — they don’t all hold deep metaphorical significance. There’s a running gag with news anchors (the old man gets dropped for a new, hotter one while the woman puts on glasses to add gravitas) that’s more yucks than depth.
But, as the plot proceeds and the power of women over men shifts from tentative to assured, Alderman’s true interest becomes clear. The world changes, men become second-class citizens, what it means to be a “real woman” takes on whole new dimensions of meaning, but the shape of power remains the same. New regimes rise — just as brutal, just as heartless as those that came before. When the question comes up, as it always does, why people with power do what they do, hurt who they hurt, steal what they steal, the answer is: “Because they could.”
All of Alderman’s characters feel fully formed. Her prose is beautiful, clear, and occasionally profound. And at 382 pages (in hardcover), there’s no flab on this book. It moves. I found myself putting it down to go sleep, laying my head on the pillow, and immediately picking it back up — just to see what happens next, just to find the next quotable line, the next idea I want to ruminate on.
Now: I have some quibbles with the book. The framing narrative, like Atwood’s in The Handmaid’s Tale, feels somewhat bony and unformed. Some plot points fall flat, some side-characters trundle through the story in two dimensions. But those are little things. Honestly, I loved this book. It felt vital, grounded, and important. While it should be read in any class that touches on feminist science fiction, I believe this novel should be required reading for the entire human race. We could all do with some deeper reflection on the anatomy of power; what we have, what we lack, how we use it, how it is used on us. And I’ve never read a cleaner or more accurate dissection of power than this.