The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
With all of the accusations against powerful men coming to light in recent years, there couldn’t be a better time for a book like ‘The Power’. This book asks audiences to imagine a world where women have the ability to flip the power dynamic. What would happen in that world? How would it change society as a whole? Now is a perfect time for these questions and having men, in particular, see how many of the tropes used to define women/feminity are a complete construct of the power inherent in a patriarchal society.
The questions raised in ‘The Power’ end up being more thought-provoking than the narrative itself. I really wanted to like this book, and the POV characters chosen by Alderman were brilliant (a cult/religious leader, a senator, a journalist on the frontlines, etc). These characters should have been able to capture in a comprehensive way the effects of the power on the world/society. However, I felt each character arch was lacking in the rich detail needed to fully engross the reader and bring to life this new world. The lack of detail leaves the reader with a general sense of watching events unfold from far afar instead of immersing them in it.
With a ten-year timeline leading up to ‘something’ (don’t want to spoil anything) there was more than enough space to cover the events leading up it and how the power changed society. Yet, many of these changes are told not shown: “Now they will know that they are the ones who should not walk out of their houses alone at night” or “boys dressing as girls to seem more powerful. Girls dressing as boys…to leap on the unsuspecting”. These are two examples of where it would have been far richer to experience this fear through the eyes of the characters than to be told about it. There is one male character who experiences rape in a bar, but it’s told later on and this removes the poignancy of how this act has changed how this character sees the world. Due to the lack of a fully realized world, the character development suffers leaving most of the characters flat.
Alderman did include technology well in the story, adding emails, texts, online conspiracy forums. However, the incorporation of these elements didn’t help to fully realize the world making them nice touches that lacked the depth to enhance the narrative context. Really this book either needed to be much longer to explore the many facets of this newly created world and all of the characters that it brings up or needed to go more micro and focus on say two characters and really dig into their narrative perspectives.
In the end, the questions this book raises linger longer than the plot or characters.
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