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Jul. 31st, 2018 11:29 amThe Power by Naomi Alderman
The premise of The Power is that suddenly, nearly all women develop the ability to channel powerful and potentially deadly electrical shocks through their bodies. They proceed to renegotiate all of gender politics.
The book starts out in kind of the obvious ways you'd expect this premise to develop- women start to rectify wrongs using their newfound power. Rapists are brought to justice, the Saudi regime collapses under the weight of women not taking abuse anymore, a whole lot of feminist wish fulfillment. As the novel develops, the straightforward imputed positive results of men no longer holding violence over women as a mechanism of control becomes more complicated and ugly as women discover the challenges of wielding power.
In parallel to these global developments, which are mostly tracked through the eyes of a male Nigerian journalist, Alderman traces the spiritual journey of a woman who begins to call herself Mother Eve, who develops a new religion, a matriarchal Christian sect. Eve is guided by a voice that seems to know the consequences of her choices before she makes them. Is the voice God, or Satan?
The answer, in fact, is neither. Alderman sets up briefly in the beginning, and reinforces at the end, a frame story about authorship. The Power, Watsonianly, is being written 5000 years in the future by a male author, Neil, in a society where women all have the Power and it has long been a fundamental social structure that women are violent and powerful and men domestic and subservient. It is his attempt to reconstruct from limited historical information how The Power spread and how society reacted. Thus the construct of the voice Eve hears is actually a literary device employed by Neil, a tool for him to explore the inevitability of history. And for Alderman, the construct allows her to create a (rather blasphemous) comparison to the modern religious person's relationship to the Bible, particularly with respect to the way that modern people of faith look to the Bible for guidance on questions of gender politics.
I thought that the novel was really gripping and well-told, surprising and thought-provoking. But I'm a little uncertain how I felt about the frame story. You can't get rid of it- some of the story undermines its own themes if you forget that it's being written by a man- but the fact that the novel undermines itself like that is a little tricky to think about. Good-tricky, but tricky.
S is for Silence by Sue Grafton
A pretty good entry in the series- I loved how playfully Grafton set up so many potential killers with compelling motives, and I thought this was in some ways a nice match to Alderman in its exploration of the connection between violence and patriarchy, both at an individual and societal level. I was frustrated, though, by the lack of a Henry storyline or a Cheney storyline or a Tasha storyline. This was very much a Kinsey-on-her-own book, and I keep hoping for the Kinsey accumulates a bit of family arc that Grafton continually hints at and never builds. I ought to be resigned by now to the fact that it's never going to happen- Kinsey can form meaningful connections, but she's never going to be all that interested in maintaining them.
"The Rules of the Game" by Saladin Ahmed
Star Wars novella set in Canto Bight, part of an anthology of four Canto Bight novellae. Con man picks on rube tourist, discovers a conscience, hijinks ensue. Lots of fun, more interesting than Canto Bight in the actual film. Next up in the anthology is a Mira Grant story. We'll see how that goes.
"Now More than Ever by Zadie Smith
Satire of social media driven mobs, but a surprisingly clever one. I'm not entirely sure I understand all Smith is doing, because of all the quick turns and twists.
I like the narration's ambivalence about its own central questions. Smith is very clear that the mobs are going after genuine bad behavior, and that the narrator is caught in a trap of social norms that has conditioned them to empathize with the powerful more than the powerless. But still... Smith very perceptively calls attention to the way this system of social-media driven call-outs is bad at forgiveness, and fails to handle intersectional cases and places where multiple parties share blame for a wrong, and elides complexity. I love the way the whole story is constructed out of twitter catchphrases, ending of course on a deeply uncertain 'me too'. I appreciate the literalization of the metaphor of 'beyond the pale', Smith asking what life would be like if we really treated people who said things beyond the pale things as unworthy of being part of civilization.
But there is also a reading of the story that I think is overly sympathetic to the narrator. You can read the story as saying that the mobs have run amok and need to be reined in, and I'm pretty sure that's not what Smith is intending saying, but there are critics who have said "This is a weirdly reactionary story".
The premise of The Power is that suddenly, nearly all women develop the ability to channel powerful and potentially deadly electrical shocks through their bodies. They proceed to renegotiate all of gender politics.
The book starts out in kind of the obvious ways you'd expect this premise to develop- women start to rectify wrongs using their newfound power. Rapists are brought to justice, the Saudi regime collapses under the weight of women not taking abuse anymore, a whole lot of feminist wish fulfillment. As the novel develops, the straightforward imputed positive results of men no longer holding violence over women as a mechanism of control becomes more complicated and ugly as women discover the challenges of wielding power.
In parallel to these global developments, which are mostly tracked through the eyes of a male Nigerian journalist, Alderman traces the spiritual journey of a woman who begins to call herself Mother Eve, who develops a new religion, a matriarchal Christian sect. Eve is guided by a voice that seems to know the consequences of her choices before she makes them. Is the voice God, or Satan?
The answer, in fact, is neither. Alderman sets up briefly in the beginning, and reinforces at the end, a frame story about authorship. The Power, Watsonianly, is being written 5000 years in the future by a male author, Neil, in a society where women all have the Power and it has long been a fundamental social structure that women are violent and powerful and men domestic and subservient. It is his attempt to reconstruct from limited historical information how The Power spread and how society reacted. Thus the construct of the voice Eve hears is actually a literary device employed by Neil, a tool for him to explore the inevitability of history. And for Alderman, the construct allows her to create a (rather blasphemous) comparison to the modern religious person's relationship to the Bible, particularly with respect to the way that modern people of faith look to the Bible for guidance on questions of gender politics.
I thought that the novel was really gripping and well-told, surprising and thought-provoking. But I'm a little uncertain how I felt about the frame story. You can't get rid of it- some of the story undermines its own themes if you forget that it's being written by a man- but the fact that the novel undermines itself like that is a little tricky to think about. Good-tricky, but tricky.
S is for Silence by Sue Grafton
A pretty good entry in the series- I loved how playfully Grafton set up so many potential killers with compelling motives, and I thought this was in some ways a nice match to Alderman in its exploration of the connection between violence and patriarchy, both at an individual and societal level. I was frustrated, though, by the lack of a Henry storyline or a Cheney storyline or a Tasha storyline. This was very much a Kinsey-on-her-own book, and I keep hoping for the Kinsey accumulates a bit of family arc that Grafton continually hints at and never builds. I ought to be resigned by now to the fact that it's never going to happen- Kinsey can form meaningful connections, but she's never going to be all that interested in maintaining them.
"The Rules of the Game" by Saladin Ahmed
Star Wars novella set in Canto Bight, part of an anthology of four Canto Bight novellae. Con man picks on rube tourist, discovers a conscience, hijinks ensue. Lots of fun, more interesting than Canto Bight in the actual film. Next up in the anthology is a Mira Grant story. We'll see how that goes.
"Now More than Ever by Zadie Smith
Satire of social media driven mobs, but a surprisingly clever one. I'm not entirely sure I understand all Smith is doing, because of all the quick turns and twists.
I like the narration's ambivalence about its own central questions. Smith is very clear that the mobs are going after genuine bad behavior, and that the narrator is caught in a trap of social norms that has conditioned them to empathize with the powerful more than the powerless. But still... Smith very perceptively calls attention to the way this system of social-media driven call-outs is bad at forgiveness, and fails to handle intersectional cases and places where multiple parties share blame for a wrong, and elides complexity. I love the way the whole story is constructed out of twitter catchphrases, ending of course on a deeply uncertain 'me too'. I appreciate the literalization of the metaphor of 'beyond the pale', Smith asking what life would be like if we really treated people who said things beyond the pale things as unworthy of being part of civilization.
But there is also a reading of the story that I think is overly sympathetic to the narrator. You can read the story as saying that the mobs have run amok and need to be reined in, and I'm pretty sure that's not what Smith is intending saying, but there are critics who have said "This is a weirdly reactionary story".