BookJack talks about the novel "Power" by the British writer Naomi Alderman - the book, which became a bestseller in the author's homeland in 2016, was translated into Russian. The events of the novel unfold in a world where women can shock other people - at first they are persecuted and hounded, but then everything turns upside down, and now men find themselves in a weak position. Let us tell why The Force should be ranked rather as a dark dystopia in the spirit of Huxley, Orwell or Zamyatin (this story does not end with anything good), and not to modern feminist prose.
Alderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist. She was the lead writer for Perplex City, an Alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June, 2007. Her father is Geoffrey Alderman, an academic who has specialised in Anglo-Jewish history. She and her father were interviewed in The Sunday Times "Relative Values" feature on 11 February 2007.
Imagine a world in which first adolescent girls and then older women develop a new ability - they can shock other people. The strength of the discharge varies depending on intention - a precise and strong blow to the heart or temple brings instant death, a weak one is like a tickle - pleasant or even exciting. As you might guess, at first the "electric girls" cause fear and disgust: families are trying to "cure" them of a dangerous gift (when the organ responsible for generating electricity is removed, every second person dies, but this is considered an acceptable level of losses), and in the most conservative regions girls are thrown out into the street, maimed, killed. Any woman who knows how to release sparks from her palms becomes a legal object of persecution and harassment.
However, little by little, the situation is changing, and women in various parts of the world unite against their tormentors. The most creepy misogynical regimes collapse, everyday sexism is expelled by the cleansing power of lightning, girls are taught to wield their new weapons and use them carefully and wisely. However, the changes turn out to be much broader: women are in fact becoming the stronger sex, and this rapidly - in a matter of years - turns the entire familiar social hierarchy upside down. Women are publicly flexing their electric muscles, rewriting religious dogmas (God is now officially called "She" or "Mother") and recklessly sharing the power that they have been deprived of for so long. The pretty girls-TV presenters, called upon by their youth and naivety to set off the charisma and intelligence of the more mature male presenters, are being replaced by handsome boys, whose only task is to blink touchingly on the air, blush sweetly and not understand anything until the woman explains. The head of the family is a wise and powerful mother, who is capable of protecting her husband and children from physical abuse if something happens.
If Naomi Alderman's The Force, one of the greatest UK bestsellers in 2016, had finished at this point, it could be safely put on a par with other feminist pamphlets like Christina Dulcher's The Voice or Margaret Atwood's last year's Testaments. ... However, the building that Alderman erects on the basis of his original assumption hints at a completely different genre and conceptual attribution, placing The Force on a par with the great dystopias of the past rather than with the proclamation novels of today.
Revision of the gender hierarchy and a brilliant victory over male hegemony is only the first step in Alderman's book. The next stage - from the centuries-old object of violence, women become its triumphant subject. Restrictions and prohibitions, in comparison with which the strictest Sharia norms seem child's play, are multiplying, and for any attempt to bypass them, a man will experience pain ranging from excruciating to murderous. “We know what men will do, once they get the upper hand, we have already seen it,” this phrase becomes a universal mantra, legitimizing any oppression of men. What inevitably follows this, in general, it is easy to predict: the flaring up resistance to the new gender tyranny is replaced by an inevitable war of all against all, in which everyone - be it a man or a woman - uses the force at his disposal for evil for one single reason: simply because what can.
Naomi Alderman does not skimp on shocking scenes. A man as a victim of rape, a man as a disenfranchised and uncomplaining livestock, a man as an excess that is easy to sacrifice (after all, for the reproduction of mankind as a species, so many boys are definitely not required) - the situations constructed by Alderman hit the reader's nerves especially hard, because - we give ourselves in this report or not - in all these roles we are used to seeing women. The effect of defamiliarisation arising as a result of such a change in gender roles allows one to fully realize the injustice and horror of any discrimination based on gender.
However, this - impressive, no doubt - message of Naomi Alderman's tasks, apparently, are not limited to. Any force - physical or electrical, any advantage given by nature inevitably leads to an imbalance, and the fact that men rule in today's society is nothing more than a historical accident: if you were in the dominant position of a woman, the result would be the same or, in any case , very similar. Justice is unattainable, harmony is impossible, one form of diktat is inevitably replaced by another, and woe to the one who, at the last turn of the wheel, was on top - the hour will come when the tears of the humiliated and oppressed will pour out to him a hundredfold. It is this idea, which from the very beginning sounds like a quiet refrain on the pages of The Force, and towards the end simply develops into a thunderous staccato, that makes Naomi Alderman's book related to the novels of Zamyatin, Orwell and Huxley - both in clear and hopeless pessimism, and in artistic power and almost blinding brightness.
This article was sponsored by Robert Bachhuber
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