Naomi Alderman's The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and it's easy to see why. This is a fantastic, subversive and thought provoking novel that will leave you questioning so many things in your everyday life and examining your own thoughts and ideals on just about every page.
Imagine a world where everything is suddenly turned on its head and women hold all the power - literally. At an unspecified moment in time teenage girls around the world begin to discover that with a simple touch of the hand they can inflict agonising pain and even death through a jolt of electric current. There follows a worldwide revolution and society, religion and governments are utterly transformed. We follow the stories of 4 main characters: Roxy, the only daughter of a notorious London gangster; Allie, an American teenager in foster care; Tunde, an opportunistic Nigerian journalist; and Margot, an ambitious American politician, as the course of their lives is forever altered by this turn of events.
This really is fabulous satire. With her intelligent, engaging and subtly humorous writing Alderman illuminates with glaring and startling obviousness the extent of sexism in society today. By reversing the situation and showing men as "the weaker sex" she shows how ridiculous it is that women are routinely treated in this way. Although she touches on many serious and shocking practices in the world today such as female genital mutilation and sex trafficking, the subtle instances of casual sexism, as in the following observations, show with a brilliant irony how prevalent sexist attitudes are in all areas of life.
There were many times when reading when I found myself with a wry smile reflecting on the truth of these subtle situations, so humorous when describing men in this way, yet so true in the media when you swap the gender roles portrayed. And particularly pertinent when many prominent women working in the British media are asking questions about why they are treated differently to their male colleagues. Does this scene describing the presenters on a local news / tv magazine show seem somehow familiar?
Matt laughs and says, I couldn't even have watched! He's very attractive, a good ten years younger than Kristen. The network had found him. Just trying something out. While we're at it, Kristen, why don't you wear your glasses onscreen now, it'll give you more gravitas. We're going to see how the numbers play out this way.
This is undoubtedly a feminist novel, and a very important social commentary, but it is also a very readable and razor sharp satire. It also touches on the nature of truth and propaganda and how easy it can be to rewrite history or at least to skew history towards a certain viewpoint. A really good novel and a worthy prize winner. Read it and hope that in the future your grandchildren will read it and wonder how it was possible that sexism could have been so prevalent in all societies in 2017.
