The Power

This is how the world ends—or at least how the patriarchal structures that have defined Western Civilization for five-thousand years will end: with a clumsy and poorly orchestrated international cabal of women deciding that negotiation, compromise, cooperation, and trust will not work. The forbidding flash of nuclear bombs and the beginnings of The Cataclysm stem from Allie’s acceptance of the inevitability of apocalyptic cleansing. For years, her idealistic rhetoric stressed the hope that women and men might find their way to a new Earth, one governed by women this time. The message found an audience, surely—compelled by the voice in her head, Allie long preached an inclusive message of global unity under the control and direction of giving and loving women.

That Allie must direct Tatiana’s execution herself indicates in one moment her power and her helplessness. She sees that women, gifted with the advantage of the skein, are in the end fallible, fragile, and corruptible humans. The only way to give women the chance to run the world, she sees, is to bomb humanity back to the Stone Age. It is an unsettling moment. Allie as Mother Eve has seemed positioned to give spiritual value to the emerging power of women. Her surrender to global cleansing consigns humanity to what will be five-thousand years of a long, difficult recovery.

Skein-less, Roxy finally emerges as Armon’s narrative hero. After she dismisses the bloody tissue of her skein and at last sees biology for what it is, she asserts a different kind of woman power. Among the novel’s principal women, only Roxy survives. She is not in Bessapara. She has not given into the inevitability of apocalypse. She has helped Tunde and reconciled with her father. Her power lies in forgiveness, communication, trust, and cooperation, rather than in the skein. She refuses to let biology determine her destiny. She is both a part of the new woman’s movement and apart from its corruption. She closes Armon’s narrative with a look to the future, saying, “Bet if I had a daughter she’d be strong as fuck” (372).

In the end The Power is not an account of the rise of women in the wake of a biological anomaly. That story is the invention of a historian and novelist five millennia in the future. And thus the novel is really about him. The exchange of letters between Armon and Alderman that closes the novel reveals the dark side of the world that empowered women have fashioned. The man is cloyingly sycophantic, working to curry favor with the powerful female editor. He meekly apologizes for aspects of his recreation of the rise of women that might offend his editor. The editor, for her part, reveals a nostalgia for a world kinder and gentler than the contemporary era, a suggestion that now that women rule the world problems persist.

The frame allows the reader to see Armon’s motivation. He is a novelist, not only an historian. Within the artistic freedom of fiction, Armon uses his four characters to skewer women without directly offending women in power. His novel shows that power, not gender, corrupts and that women have shaped a world as corrupt, menacing, and oppressive as any that men built. Indeed, to get his work published, Armon must agree to change his name and pretend to be a woman, abandoning his identity like so many women novelists were compelled to do before the 20th century. A second, more likely possibility is that he can stand by helplessly while his editor, a woman named Naomi Alderman, steals his work and puts her name on it—just as Tunde’s editor did.