 tell a compelling story about how awful it is, dismantle it, and slice you into a grid of quivering gelatin with her laser-like prose. Alderman’s not there yet but she has incredible potential. The Power is an electrifying, horrifying read. One day, a peculiar thing happens: women can suddenly zap people. Literally. With electricity. The phenomenon seems to spread via physical contact: a jolt from one woman will awaken the ability in another. Research is carried out. Scientists find a previously overlooked organ of sorts in women’s chests. Called the skein, this structure is capable of generating electricity in much the same way electric eels do. Suddenly weaponized, women set about changing everything, but these changes occur with a dreadful, almost tidal inevitability. Because the book is told inside of a narrative frame -- it is structured as a manuscript written in the future, reconstructing the historical events surrounding the emergence of women’s abilities -- there is no need for the various characters’ arcs to coincide neatly. The Avengers don’t need to assemble, in other words. Alderman does something much smarter here: giving the big picture of what might plausibly happen in this implausible turn of events rather than pulling the characters together in an MCU-like assemblage. After all, there’s no single bad guy to fight here: it’s a system; it’s the patriarchy. Convergence would have undermined the narrative, and Alderman has sensibly steered clear of that. Things do go horribly wrong, of course, and Alderman’s navigation of the story’s moral grey areas is her real triumph. Some women are bent on revenge, both individual and wholesale. Power corrupts. Armies are assembled. Men fight back. Other men are raped, mutilated, and/or electrocuted. The overarching question here is whether they had it coming. Have centuries of oppression given women the moral high ground now that men are the weaker sex? What exactly is inevitable about the pleasures of unpunished violence, of power? If I have a point of criticism, it would be the intersection of characterization and voice. The novel is told from several points of view: Allie, a young girl who kills her foster father during an attempt to molest her; Tunde, a young man from Nigeria who is one of the first to film women using their electric powers; Roxy, a British girl with an extraordinary level of power; Margot, an American mayor forced to conceal her abilities during the early days of the societal changes; Tatiana, the first lady of Moldova who (not much of a spoiler here) becomes that country’s president in a shocking turn of events. While everyone in this novel has a story, they can sometimes begin to sound and feel indistinguishable. Partly this is to do with Alderman’s own authorial voice. Although she is strong and articulate and in charge of her prose, she doesn’t sound American when she needs to and neither do her American characters and settings. This isn’t the issue in itself so much as an example of characters not quite feeling fleshed out and lived in, so to speak. (Clive Barker also struggles with this.) There are hints of a Buffy-like brattiness in the younger female characters. In a graphic-novel adaptation, there would be a lot of side-eye. But The Power wouldn’t have worked if she had tried telling it from one focalized perspective, one single character’s point of view. On the whole, I would say she took a narrative risk and it (more than) paid off. The Power was and is one of those rare novels that represent a genuine cultural moment, a snapshot of the zeitgeist. Alderman was selected by Margaret Atwood for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a program that pairs early-career creatives with successful mentors, and this book arose out of that collaboration. Atwood is a writer of astonishing scope and precision: few others have her ability to show the big picture, tell a compelling story about how awful it is, dismantle it, and slice you into a grid of quivering gelatin with her laser-like prose. Alderman’s not there yet but she has incredible potential. The Power is an electrifying, horrifying read. Review by Marshall Moore  'Electrifying' Margaret Atwood 'A big, page-turning, thought-provoking thriller' Guardian ---------------------------------- All over the world women are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain - even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they've lost control. The Day of the Girls has arrived - but where will it end? ---------------------------------- 'The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid's Tale' Cosmopolitan 'I loved it; it was visceral, provocative and curiously pertinent . . . The story has stayed with me since' Stylist, The Decade's 15 Best Books by Remarkable Women 'Superb. Insightful, thrilling, funny. Well-crafted, compelling, serious-minded' Daily Telegraph 'Fascinating, ingenious, rattles with a furious pace. Deserves to be read by every woman (and, for that matter, every man)' The Times 'Irresistible. Holds a mirror up to the here and now' Mail on Sunday 'Chilling, thrilling, a blast' Financial Times  Marshall Moore is an American author, publisher, and academic based in Cornwall, England. He is the author of four novels (Inhospitable, Bitter Orange, An Ideal for Living, and The Concrete Sky) and three short-fiction collections (A Garden Fed by Lightning, The Infernal Republic, and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room). With Xu Xi, he is the co-editor of the anthology The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong. His short stories have appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Asia Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Recent work has appeared in the anthology Hong Kong Noir (Akashic, 2018) and the journals Menacing Hedge and Bewildering Tales. His next book is a co-edited (with Sam Meekings) book from Bloomsbury. The title is The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth, and he teaches at Falmouth University. For more information, please visit www.marshallmoore.com. Linkages: Website/blog: www.marshallmoore.com Twitter: @iridiumgobbler Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Marshall-Moore/e/B001K8LUDC?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1610574747&sr=1-1    Comments are closed.
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