Naomi Alderman’s 2016 bestseller The Power is an absolute banger. If you haven’t read it, do. It’s a great piece of counterfactual sci-fi teeming with characters and questions, and as full of ideas as action as it asks: “What would happen if women ruled the world?”
Now it has been adapted by Raelle Tucker, Sarah Quintrell and Alderman herself into a 10-part series for Prime Video. All over the world, teenage girls and young women start developing the power to create electricity within themselves. Sparks fly from their fingertips and suddenly a new world of possibilities opens up. Their power shifts the balance of society. Now women can defend themselves. Now they can fight on equal physical terms with men.
We follow a global array of characters. In the US we meet Allie (Halle Bush), who kills her rapist foster father and then, guided by an internal voice, embarks on a spiritual quest during which she is given sanctuary with a group of rebel nuns, from where she gathers the ambition to remake religion. We also meet Margot (Toni Collette), the mayor of Seattle, who must deal with the personal and political ramifications of the phenomenon as her angst-ridden daughter Jos (Auli’i Cravalho) develops her power and the world begins to wake up to the potential revolution ahead of it.
In the UK there is Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz), the neglected daughter of a London gangster (Eddie Marsan), who has always been passed over in favour of his sons despite being twice as capable even before she started exploding trucks and electrocuting things with a single touch. She wants a seat at the table – and after her mother is murdered by thugs, revenge.
Tatiana (Zrinka Cvitešić) is the wife of a brutal eastern European dictator who soon looks to harness not just her own power but that of the other women, as the spread of the ability starts to transform her nation.
Finally there is Nigerian journalist Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh), who exploits a female colleague’s early awareness of the phenomenon, gets offered a job with CNN and goes travelling round the world as the new order’s most ardent chronicler.
In the book, this large cast is masterfully assembled and controlled by Alderman. There is time and detail enough to let the reader invest in each one. It doesn’t work quite so well on screen, where it feels like we are hopping endlessly about but, given that we don’t get to grips with what is going on until the third episode, moving ponderously slowly towards each revelation at the same time.
If there was a flaw in the book it was that – to use a literary term – things went to shit too quickly. Although we are undoubtedly too wise and/or jaded now to believe in the kinds of women-led utopias depicted in such feminist classics as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland or Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, The Power felt as though it skipped too quickly over the possibilities for difference, let alone betterment, and slid straight into a repeat of all the problems we have now, just sex-swapped.
The series only covers about a third of the book and would therefore seem to offer time to explore alternatives, even if ultimately they end the same way (electrical power corrupting as inevitably as any other, and all that). So far, however, the adaptation seems to be following the original’s path, which feels like a missed opportunity. The final two episodes were not available for review but let us assume they pave the way for a second series and hope that more can take place there. I see no reason why hunger for at least a fictional world in which women are gaining rather than losing power would have abated by then.
• The Power is on Prime Video now
