Review: Charged

Reviewed Work(s): The Power by Naomi Alderman

Review by: Kait Heacock
Source: The Women's Review of Books , July / August 2018, Vol. 35, No. 4 (July / August
2018), p. 18
Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26501093

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Charged
The Power
By Naomi Alderman
New York, NY; Little, Brown & Company, 2017, 400 pp., $26.00, hardcover
Reviewed by Kait Heacock
T
here exists a popular subgenre of movies
and books featuring rape revenge: I Spit on
Your Grave, Baise-Moi, and most recently the
2018 French horror film Revenge. What
always troubles me about their storylines is
that a woman must be victimized before she finds
her strength. Berkeley Professor Carol J. Clover
coined the term “final girl” in her book Men,
Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film to describe the trope of the one girl to survive
the slaughter and, against all odds, defeat her
assailant (at least temporarily, so that there can be a
sequel). What does female violence look like when
it’s not reactionary, in self-defense, or a desperate
pushed-to-the-brink response to the horrors
perpetrated against us? It looks a lot like male
violence—which is to say, like a way of wielding
power.
In Naomi Alderman’s riveting novel The Power
(published in the UK in 2017 and in the US soon
after), girls around the world are suddenly,
mysteriously endowed with a psychic ability to
cause electric shocks in others—with results that
range from a buzzy jolt of static electricity to death.
The characters grasp for scientific explanations—
“...the strip of striated muscles across the girls’
collarbones which they name the organ of electricity,
or the skein for its twisted strands. At the points of
the collar are electro-receptors enabling, they
theorize, a form of electric echolocation”—but
Alderman is not concerned with how the girls can
shock, but what they do with the capacity. This is
literary speculative fiction that asks what becomes
of society when some of its most vulnerable
members have the ability to easily hurt and
overpower others.
The violence starts small. First we meet Allie, a
kid from Alabama who uses her newfound gift to
kill the foster dad who had been raping her for
years: “Nothing special has happened today; no
one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is
only that every day one grows a little, every day
something is different, so that in the heaping up of
days suddenly a thing that was impossible has
become possible.” The Power grows. In Moldova, a
country with one of the highest rates of sexual
slavery, women in a human trafficking ring are
given the Power and revolt against the system that
had long exploited their bodies. Almost
immediately girls with the Power discover they can
pass it on to women, and these mutinies against
exploitation and oppression begin to pop up
around the world.
Alderman uses alternating viewpoints to closely
follow the Power ’s hold over some of her
characters. Allie runs away, changes her name to
18 Women’s Review of Books
Mother Eve, and begins a religious movement.
Roxy, a Londoner who first discovers her abilities
when fighting for her life in a home invasion that
leaves her mother dead, joins the family crime
syndicate and becomes her father ’s muscle.
Margot, a Midwestern politician, struggles with
how to raise a daughter whose Power doesn’t come
in steadily like it does for other girls. The only male
protagonist, Tunde, is a Nigerian journalist. After
he witnesses “The Day of the Girls”—when girls
around the world collectively receive their
powers—Tunde throws himself into war zones like
Saudi Arabia and India, reporting on the revolution
occasioned by the Power.
Allie, Roxy, and Margot represent the ways that
power corrupts in religion, crime, and politics,
respectively. Impressively, they never feel like
archetypes because Alderman allows readers inside
their heads as they struggle with their blessing and
their curse: Mother Eve begins to unravel the Bible
and rewrite it with Goddess as creator. As her new
religion spreads across the Internet, she becomes
elevated to a Pope-like status. But she quickly
displays paranoia and a need to control, traits often
seen in cult leaders. Margot’s power grip starts
with building training camps where girls can
understand and learn how to safely use the Power.
As she climbs the political ladder, her training
Vol. 35, No. 4, July/August 2018
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camps grow, until they become an army unto
themselves. Roxy goes on an organized spree to kill
all the people responsible for her mother’s murder,
until she becomes intertwined with her father and
brother in Sopranos-level family dysfunction. As the
characters’ lives intersect across time and countries,
we see through their eyes how society is
fundamentally changed by this power shift, and
how it cannot go back.
Something wakes up inside these girls and
women, not merely the capital “P” Power that
enables them to kill a person with the flick of their
fingers, but the desire for control—for control to be
out of men’s hands and into their own. Alderman
writes, “It follows that there are two ways for the
nature and use of human power to change. One is
that an order might issue from the palace, a
command unto the people saying, ‘It is thus.’ But
the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is
that those thousand thousand points of light should
each send a new message. When the people change,
the palace cannot hold.”
M
y favorite feminist books are those in
which women behave as badly as men
do, where being equal is not just to be
seen as being as good as men, but also as bad. And
this is where The Power truly succeeds, showing us
that once violence becomes a part of women’s
legacy, they’re really not much different from men.
Once we remove men from power, that doesn’t
mean we enter a matriarchal utopia. Tunde
witnesses the war crimes being committed by
female soldiers, and soon he becomes the moral
center of the book. In a sea of fascinating female
characters, Alderman chose to tell many of the most
harrowing scenes through a male perspective. The
tables have been turned. Men are now the victims—
and the reader is left to feel empathy for them, the
powerless.
You can’t read The Power today and not think of
it as a metaphor for the #MeToo movement, despite
the book being published before the hashtag went
viral. In a January 2018 New York Times interview,
Alderman says, “I was probably responding to the
same thing that #MeToo is responding to. A lot of
things have become visible now, things that we
need to address.”
Today, as I write this, men are questioning
themselves, pondering the consent of past sexual
encounters, rethinking their office interactions, and
checking themselves before they speak. They’re
afraid of the repercussions of their behavior toward
women—they are afraid of women’s power—some
of them for the first time.
Good. Let them. They’re experiencing an ounce
of the fear and anxiety women feel every day. And
we’re nowhere close to the power their fingers still
grip. What’s next? In The Power —where it isn’t just
the “bad” men who are affected—we see what
society looks like when power is unfairly amassed
by anyone. By the end, girls don’t come in to the
Power around puberty; they are born with it. No
longer are they survivors; they are conquerors.
There is no “final girl;” these girls are the beginning
of a new order.
Kait Heacock is the author of the short story
collection Siblings and Other Disappointments. She is
at work on a novel about the teen girl experience,
and the power girls find when they tell their stories.
She lives in Seattle.