The Power

The Power is a frame narrative, meaning is a novel-within-a-novel. Naomi Alderman, a British writer born in 1974, steps away from her own novel to create a fictional author, Neil Adam Armon, who has written an epic work of historical fiction that recreates an ancient world five-thousand years in his past, a time recognizable as Alderman’s own era.

This structure raises questions about what the frame adds. The account of the civilization’s pitch into the apocalypse after women tap into the power of a genetic anomaly would be sufficient material for any novel. Why the frame, readers may ask, and why create a male author struggling to find a publisher for a novel so outrageous in its recreation of this era that his own editor doubts anyone would believe it: a time when women were not in charge, a time when women were victimized by men. The frame allows perspective. By using the device of an author looking back into what, for him, is Antiquity shrouded in mystery, the contemporary reader gains perspective into the conditions that patriarchy has imposed on women today. The scenes in Delhi and Saudi Arabia, as well as the conditions of the enslaved women in Bessapara, are not science fiction.