The story, which unfolds over a 10-year period, is written as though it is historical fiction from the perspective of a matriarchal society.
The buds of the skeins have been observed using MRI scans in the collarbones of newborn infant girls. At the points of the collar are electro-receptors enabling, they theorise, a form of electric echo-location. a team in Delhi are the first to discover the strip of striated muscles across the girls’ collarbones which they name the organ of electricity, or the skein for its twisted strands. But in Alderman’s tale, the women have not been subjugated by the men instead they have achieved an extraordinary level of power, not in the conventional sense, but in a new female-only ability to electrocute people by touch. Like most dystopian fiction with a feminist slant, the story owes a lot to Margaret Atwood’s classic of the genre, The Handmaid’s Tale. The contents, I’m pleased to say, were just as satisfying. I treated myself to the hardcover gift edition (only available to purchase in Waterstones) as an early Christmas present last November and loved the look, feel and weight of it in my hand (there’s something so satisfying about holding a well made physical book, isn’t there, especially if the pages turn and lie open easily and the text doesn’t run into the gutter). Naomi Alderman’s The Power won the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Fiction – hardcover Penguin (Waterstones Exclusive Gift Edition) 352 pages 2017.
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