a shell game of power?

All our regular get-togethers are starting up again for the new year.

Monday it's the Mill on the Exe for the Stammtisch and by Thursday I'm supposed to have read 'The Wind-Up Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi in time for our pub discussion.

I got diverted along the way by an Xmas present book - The Power, by Naomi Alderman. I've obviously told enough people about the dystopian Book Club so I'm now being given relevant gifts.

Having recently read and talked about Vox for the same book club, it was interesting to flip from a crazy male domination story (electric shock word counters for women) to an equally unbalanced female domination one - also based around electricity.

In The Power there's a skeinful of new properties available to women which leads to subjugation of men. It plays out through three or four principal characters whose paths intersect.

I somehow preferred the story-telling in The Power to that of Vox. There seemed to be more to the premise, although the latter part of the novel became something like an Indiana Jones movie with jungle incidents and vicious female warriors.

It was easier to see what the author was trying to portray in The Power, and there was an initially subtle ramping of the effect from early discovery to later chapters of bleak realisation.

And no mistaking that the matriarchal power game wasn't so different from the more often written patriarchal one.

If I'm honest, I found some of the novel's middle section a bit heavy going. A new religion, a gangster hierarchy - it made the moves but somehow didn't develop them.

That's not to say there wasn't plenty to play with. I wondered if there was a quiet hint of Mikoto Misaka style Manga too, with the drug called Glitter although no certain scientific use of railgun ;-) Personally I thought a few further references could have added to the second half of the story telling and from an already female empowered source.

The author's overt humoiur was left for a few cheeky elements, when the book flipped into a meta-novel at the start and end. "Surely you'd be better submitting this as a woman?" suggested the female voice of the pretend agent to the (pretend) male voice of the author.

Even the shell games had shell games.

Next up will be my reading of the Wind-Up Girl. Here's that vintage Dresden Dolls track about a *ahem* coin operated boy.