In the weeks before my daughter was born I was surprised by how many well-wishers told me that I would notice a contrast between her temperament and that of my son. She would be less noisy, they said, more serene. It’s still early days… but it’s the kind of thing Naomi Alderman’s new novel gets you thinking about.
It’s a brash sci-fi fantasy, clever and coarse, calculated and hectic, with the premise that sometime around 2018 girls everywhere find that they have the ability to emit lethal bolts of electricity – generated by a previously undetected length of flesh under the collarbone. Governments fall, there’s a new religion, and online forums throb with talk of “the coming gender war”.
Alderman tells the story from several points of view. In London, 14-year-old Roxy uses “the power” to avenge her mother’s gangland killing. In midwest America, a voice-hearing orphan, Allie, uses it to murder her abusive foster carer before styling herself “Mother Eve”. Also in the mix is Tunde, a Nigerian journalist reporting on an uprising in Moldova, “the world capital of sex-trafficking”, where the female population wage civil war against forces backed by the exiled king of Saudi Arabia.
Anarchic, semi-satirical invention is what most energises The Power; it doesn’t sweat the small stuff. When a crook sells knock-off toys “down Peckham market”, the problem isn’t the made-up detail, it’s the laziness of the shorthand; Tunde, wounded, recalls his mother’s “jollof rice bubbling on the stove”. I confess I glazed over, too, during the over-choreographed action sequences, whose celluloid sensibility makes writing seem the poor relation of film: “as he’s stooping to defend her, she twists right, reaches up, grabs his ear”, and so on.
Where Alderman excels is in how thoroughly she develops her conceit. The new world order ends up a mirror image of the one it usurps: as the deft framing narrative informs us, the story of Roxy et al is actually a revisionist historical novel written in a hazily post-apocalyptic future in which female supremacy is viewed as inevitable. When the (male) author sends the unpublished manuscript to his friend (a lauded novelist), she objects on the grounds of simple “evolutionary psychology”. Women, “with babies to protect”, have always had to be “aggressive and violent”; if a patriarchy had ever existed, surely it would have been “loving and naturally nurturing?”
The Power puts its kick-ass attitude and thrill-a-minute vim in the service of a blunt but valuable reminder that gender is nothing but what we make it. By the time my children are old enough to read it, I suspect the story may be better known as the blockbuster movie adaptation it often seems to anticipate; but I’ll make sure to hang on to my copy all the same.
The Power is published by Viking (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.65