The Power

Research frame narratives. Why put the frame in at all? What is gained or lost by introducing the interplay between the male historian and the female editor?

Compare and contrast Roxy with and without the skein. Which character is more powerful?

Define the novel as a feminist novel. Is it, in fact, a feminist novel? What concerns of women are treated in the opening two sections? How does the novel argue that power, not gender, corrupts? Are women, in the end, any different from men when it comes to abusing power?

Discuss the relationship between biology and gender. Does biology determine the definition of gender? Does it matter that in the novel women finally come to power through an accident of biology?

Research Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Naomi Alderman has acknowledged the creative debt she owes to Atwood and to her dystopian novel. What key elements do the novels share? How are they different?

Investigate the history of apocalyptic literature as a literature not of lurid and violent endings but as a literature of the hope and consolation of new beginnings. How does the novel use the idea of global cataclysm as both optimistic and pessimistic?

The argument of the novel is that if women were given power they would be just as likely to abuse it as men. Use the drug Glitter and the scene in which the women dismember the man responsible for Roxy’s mutilation to make the case that women here abuse rather than use their power.

The novel investigates ways that religion, specifically Christianity, has long relegated women to second-class status. Discuss the new gospel of Mother Eve. Is it heretical? Is it inflammatory? Does God need to have a gender?