The Power by Naomi Alderman

Includes some spoilers.

Naomi Alderman's prize winning novel "The Power" begins with a familiar framing device. There are emails from "Naomi" to "Neil". The latter has written a history - albeit a somewhat fictionalised one - and wants the former's opinion. He is an archeologist and historian, looking back on a period of (from their perspective) ancient history. The past though is in our future - and this is where the novel begins, in our present day. The "looking back" is from a perspective of several thousand years in the future.  I'll come back to that frame.

In the present of the novel - we begin at the necessary place, when "the power" first comes to the girls. Teenage girls are the first to discover they have it - its an electric shock they can use when they touch people and things, sometimes little more than a tickle, but if they learn to control it, enough to injure or kill or worse. Like the history that it purports to be, it takes us through several origin stories. The abused girl Allie, who uses it on her foster father; the British girl, child of a gangster, who discovers the power, when her mother is attacked, the Nigerian man - soon to be a journalist - who uploads the first video of the power in action to YouTube, and an American politician who discovers it is better to hide this skill. Over time these stories will converge. Allie is the most interesting of the four characters. She runs away and guided by a voice in her head, she comes to an isolated convent where the nuns take her in. This all woman environment is where she begins to develop a new personality, a new name, and a new religion. She begins to call herself Mother Eve, and as her power develops and the voice in her head gets stronger, she begins to be a leader amongst the women.

There's a fifth story. In Moldova, a male leader dies and is replaced by his wife - who quickly declares a new country, run purely by women. Meanwhile the British girl's father realises what an asset he has in the power of his daughter, and she begins to control his drug business. When she turns up in America on the run from a revenge attack, she turns up at the convent and Mother Eve realises she has a soldier.

The power is something that appears to have always have been there but dormant - or possibly not - as some kind of nerve agent added to the waters during and after the war like flouride, so that all women now have it within them. In some ways the origins of the power matter less than what it means. Some people immediately realise it means everything has changed. Men can no longer rape or hurt women without being hurt back. In small doses it can enhance sex games. Yet at the same time this affront to masculine power means there's a counter revolution. On 4Chan like websites men use aliases as they plot revenge and converse freely of their hatred for women. Alderman, who used to develop stories for interactive game environments, is one of the few writers who is not phased by writing about the internet, but does with total confidence. It is one of the book's strengths. Compare with Eggars' "The Circle" where you get the feeling that the digital side is something he's researched.

Alderman has always been an interesting and ambitious writer, and this book really plays to her strengths. There's a lot of cleverness to her vision of this new world, a lot of spirited invention. As the book continues we move into a less speculative realm - as the action speeds up. The women's power shows itself via a "skein" that appears around their collarbone. There are men who have it as well. In the background there is the sense that this change is happening so rapidly that laws and technology can hardly keep up. At the same time the fear of these women leads to theocratic regimes in particular clamping down on the new reality - in the new Moldova, there is a war going on. Tunde, the principal male character in the novel, is now a celebrity journalist sharing his stories via his internet channels - being asked to report on the latest outburst of the phenomenon.

The pace begins to hot up - centred on the new female republic where for various reasons all the main characters have now ended up. The plot is labrynthine and breathless. Having given us plenty of explanation about the new reality, we now accept it. Like in China Mieville's "Perdido Street Station" or Lauren Beukes' "Zoo City" the new reality is no longer seen as strange. It sometimes seems the women are now almost like superheroes and the power is their super power. Though it makes the book a thrilling page turner in this latter part, I felt the move out of America leads to us losing something of the everyday strangeness. In this lawless eastern country its like anything can happen without consequence. The politician is now a senator, having finally shown her power on the televised debate. She has set up training camps for the girls in a public-private partnership. Mother Eve can only feel safe by owning the whole world - the voice in her head tells her so. Whilst Roxy, the young British girl, is now queen of the drug runners, and a new drug "glitter" which enhances the power, is being shipped across Europe.

In between chapters we have some line drawings of artefacts - a reminder that this is a "history" being told from a distant future. We now understand why - for Alderman is providing us with a satirical parallel of the world we live in. Imagine: after five thousand years of a woman-led world, can you imagine a male-led one that may have existed before? I understand why she includes this - and it adds a philosophical layer to the novel but in some ways it seems awkward, unecessary. The women taking over will lead to a war - a mighty catastrophe as men, now the weaker sex, are subjugated under their female rulers.

The novel is a deserved prize winner - it adds a substantial imaginative offering to our lists of dystopian fiction, with a distinct twist to it - but though its immensely fun to read, it does at some point, move from a strange evocation of this new world into something more like a comic book or video game. By the end there's a feeling there's no real consequence - yet there is, as the major and minor characters discover - and an awkward love story adds to that sense of flippancy. It seems to lack the intense strangeness of Ben Marcus's not entirely dissimilar "The Flame Alphabet" for instance (here it is teenagers rather than girls who are different.) I think the creation of a new religion - led by Mother Eve - feels the main story in the first part of the novel, but then it just becomes one strand of several, and the least dynamic one. I guess in the desire to create a real page turning adventure and bring us to a place of satisfactory climax, we lose some of the the depth of thought and characterisation that I so loved earlier in the novel.

So, not quite a masterpiece, but certainly one of the most rewarding and readable novels I've read for some time. In an age of dystopias it seems  a particularly original one. At times its as dark as an HBO boxset and it does feel like a novel written in and for the Netflix age. The return to the framing device at the end makes explicit what we already know - that it is our known world that is the unbelievable one, not the one of the novel, where women have all the power.