When he walked past a group of women on the road – laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky – Tunde said to himself, I’m not here, I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see. [loc. 3846]
Some time soon, teenaged girls everywhere begin to develop the ability to zap other people with electricity -- anything from a minor shock to a lethal one. A new organ, the 'skein', is identified as the organ of electricity. The girls can awaken the power in older women, too. And within months women all over the world are rising up, targetting oppressors, fighting back.
Alderman's four protagonists experience this change in different ways. Allie, whose Christian foster parents have abused her, begins to hear a guiding voice, convincing her to found an all-female community. Roxy, a London gangster's daughter, avenges her mother and stands up to her father. Margot, a middle-aged American politician, acquires the power from her troubled daughter Jos, and uses it to clear her path to power. And Tunde, a young Nigerian man who's training as a journalist, becomes a chronicler of this unforeseen revolution, travelling the world and meeting formerly-enslaved sex workers, female soldiers, and the redoubtable Tatiana, the wife of Moldova's president.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that power corrupts: that women are capable of being just as violent and cruel as men. There are some deeply unsettling scenes in the latter part of the novel, and Alderman evokes the Bacchae at one point to remind us that there's a long history of female violence. And though at first it's amusing to see the microaggressions, the nervousness, the imbalances turned upside down, it quickly becomes sobering, even depressing.
Though I've owned this novel for some years, I'd never got around to it before. I didn't know about the framing narrative, which is set far in our future (though I don't wholly accept the implicit history of how we might get there from here) and I didn't know just how unpleasant some scenes would be. I'm glad I've read it, despite those scenes, despite the bleakness: it's well-written and inventive, with interesting viewpoint characters, and it examines its central conceit with care and nuance. I wonder if the novel would be more intersectional if Alderman were writing it now.
Fulfils the ‘self-insert by author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. The framing narrative features letters by 'Neil Adam Armon' to a 'Naomi', who is a successful author and probably a former lover...
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