The Power

As a work of speculative fiction, Alderman’s novel is literally, chapter by chapter, a countdown to apocalypse. Armon’s work is a novel about what led to The Cataclysm. Although details are not clear to the historian writing some fifty centuries later, the novel suggests nuclear weapons, invoked in the grand battle between the sexes, reduced civilization to rubble. It is a grim prediction. The apocalypse has long generated a body of terrifying, lurid projections about how world’s end. By its nature, apocalyptic literature is pessimistic.

Alderman’s novel is no exception. The Cataclysm itself is an elaborate and pointless game of chicken that could have been easily stopped, save for the selfish hope among the women that the apocalypse would bring a better world—their world. As Mother Eve intones, the coming Armageddon between men and women will kill legions and usher in thousands of years of grim survival as civilization rebuilds. In the end, however, she is confident “women will win” (353). World-building requires world-cleansing. When evolution proves unreliable and when faith does not guarantee progress, people embrace the apocalypse. It is a desperate hope.

So the message of Neil Adam Armon’s historical fiction is hardly uplifting. He lives in the darkling world shaped by this apocalypse, a world still defined by suppression and authoritarianism. The only difference is that women rather than men run it. By indirection, he suggests the better way to a new world order would be through genders sharing power. Thus, the reader sees in this apocalyptic parable a cautionary tale that advocates the only way to skirt The Cataclysm is to find a way to the solution Roxy offers: cooperation, trust, and communication between the genders. 

For all its complicated novel-within-a-novel structuring, the book offers a simple lesson: in this world or any future world, men and women need to cooperate. The historian Neil Adam Armon recreates an era lost in antiquity when women first emerged as the dominant gender. He is a man living in a woman’s world, feeling the pressure of matriarchal domination, and trying his best to secure the publication of a manuscript by schmoozing to his female editor. He is intellectually enslaved: he cannot advocate for men nor can he denounce women.

Against the brutality and violence of the ascent of women bent on using the skein in ways that rival men for amorality, Armon positions the moment late in the novel in which Roxy, stripped of her skein by her own brother, and Tunde, deceived by the only woman he trusted, make love far from the chaos of war-torn Bessapara. It signals a moment of resolution, a way out of the apocalypse, and a way around the eternal battle between the sexes. It is a moment uncomplicated by irony. Both on the run, Tunde and Roxy hide together against the approaching dawn in an abandoned train station and, without agenda or provocation, share their most painful secrets. In a novel that otherwise focuses on disturbing scenes of rape and sexual abuse, the lovemaking here is both sweet and easy; it is playful and intense, at once slow and gentle yet eager and hungry. Afterwards, Tunde and Roxy caress each other’s livid scars, which are reminders of the agony caused by the opposite sex. They find their way to trust and cooperation. This becomes a muted moment of communion. As Armon says, “They fit” (324). It is a moment quickly lost in the rush to the apocalypse, but that moment “underneath a found blanket, in the center of war” (324) offers Armon’s celebration of real power: the moment when men and women find their way to unite through emotional and physical intimacy.