The Power

The Premise and What It Actually Claims

In The Power, adolescent girls discover they can release electrical jolts from their bodies — and that this capacity can be passed to older women. The skein, a thin strip of muscle developed across the collarbone, turns out to be latent in all women; it only needs to be awakened. Within a generation, the global order inverts. Men become the vulnerable sex, subject to violence they cannot reliably counter. Religions mutate. Governments fall and are replaced. What had been common sense about the relationship between men and women — who protects, who defers, who walks differently at night — reverses almost entirely.

The novel follows four protagonists across this transformation: Roxy, the daughter of a London crime boss; Allie, an abused American foster child who becomes a religious figurehead; Margot, a US politician navigating the new landscape; and Tunde, a Nigerian journalist documenting the upheaval from the newly dangerous position of a man in a world being remade without him. Their stories converge toward a society that, by the novel’s end, looks recognizably like the world we began in — only flipped.

The premise is not a thought experiment designed to argue for matriarchy. It is designed to isolate the variable of physical power and ask what we actually attribute to gender as opposed to force. Alderman’s answer is uncomfortable: most of it.

The Frame Narrative and Its Structural Irony

The Power is presented as a historical novel written by a man called Neil Adam Armon — an anagram of “Naomi Alderman” — in a matriarchal future several thousand years after the events described. Neil is writing to a mentor he calls “Naomi,” who responds in letters included before each section. The mentor is skeptical of his project. Would it not, she suggests, be more commercially viable to have a female protagonist? Does he not worry that readers will find a male perspective unrelatable?

These letters are funny and pointed and easy to miss if you read the novel too quickly. They mirror exactly the questions that have been put to women writing in male-dominated genres for generations. The authority to narrate history, Alderman is arguing, is not merely a literary question — it is a question about whose experience is legible as universal, whose perspective requires no justification, whose account of the past is trusted by default.

The frame device was pioneered in feminist fiction by Atwood, whose The Handmaid’s Tale is also framed as a discovered historical document. Alderman’s version is more explicit in its structural irony: it does not merely put a woman’s experience on the record but imagines what it would look and feel like to be the gender whose perspective requires a preface.

Power Does Not Redeem Itself

The novel’s most important and most demanding claim is that a world in which women hold physical dominance would not be meaningfully better than the one we have. The matriarchal society that develops by the novel’s end is violent, theocratic, and organized around the subordination of men in ways that mirror the subordination of women in the world we started with. Women who have the power kill, exploit, and abuse it. The female religious leader Allie — Mother Eve — is not a savior but a manipulator. Margot’s political ascent involves the same compromises and brutalities that characterize male political ambition.

This is the novel’s central provocation, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not say. Alderman is not arguing that women are as bad as men, or that feminism is naive. She is arguing that the systems that produce cruelty, corruption, and oppression are not symptoms of masculinity — they are symptoms of unchecked power. Remove the biological asymmetry that has historically underwritten patriarchy and you do not get peace; you get the same structures operating in reverse, with the same results.

This is a harder and less satisfying thesis than “women would do better.” It is also a more serious one.

The Handmaid’s Tale Is Not the Same Novel

The comparison between The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale is inevitable and, up to a point, useful. Both are feminist dystopias by authors working in the tradition of speculative fiction. Both use genre conventions to explore the relationship between gender and power. Both won major literary prizes and crossed over from genre fiction to mainstream literary attention.

The comparison breaks down at the level of thesis. Atwood’s novel is about patriarchy as a system — specifically, about the mechanisms by which women are controlled through their reproductive capacity. Gilead is a warning extrapolated from existing tendencies. The horror is in the recognizability. The Handmaid’s Tale argues that what is happening to Offred could, under sufficiently extreme conditions, happen to any woman.

Alderman’s novel is not a warning about a specific trajectory. It is an argument about the nature of power itself. Where Atwood’s Gilead is a plausible nightmare, Alderman’s matriarchal future is a thought experiment deliberately stripped of the comfort of moral clarity. Offred is a victim. Allie is not simply a victor; she is a perpetrator. The reader of The Handmaid’s Tale knows whose side to be on. The reader of The Power is not supposed to feel that secure.

Both novels are essential. They are asking different questions, and the fact that one came out of the other — Alderman was mentored by Atwood — makes the dialogue between them one of the more interesting relationships in contemporary fiction.

Our rating: 4/5 — A rigorous, unsettling feminist dystopia that refuses easy consolation and earns its central provocation by following it to the end.