Ohm's Law

Alana Jelinek

Ohm's Law Review by Sebastian Michael (film-maker 'Optimist Creations')

In her compelling debut novel, Alana Jelinek creates a world, wholly coherent and disturbingly ‘perfect’, in which the metacorps – owners of global brands, providers of end-to-end services, and holders of patents and rights over inventions, concepts and entire species – deliver everything and anything the Consumer needs, wants or can be prompted to desire.

So when the unnamed narrator, on a charity fundraising hike to Northern Thailand, leaves behind the certainties and comforts of her job and flat in London to spend time with Ohm, an indigenous woman who lives in a wooden hut in the jungle and grows her own medicines for her son, the realities of their existences respectively within and outwith the fold and hold of BLACCXN are brought into stark and life-changing relief.

The story unfolds as an internal assessment and ‘report to self’ during the first few hours of the narrator’s return home, where she weaves the events that have just happened into the process of adjusting to her restored ‘normality’: having to sort out insurance forms, square her prolonged absence with her employer and prepare for an actual real-life conversation with her mother, with whom she’s been communicating only by video message since leaving nearly three months ago.

What makes this book so rewarding and thought-provoking is Alana Jelinek’s acute sense for the subtleties of power when it expresses itself beyond the collossus of the corporation’s market value and Head Quarters presence, in the everyday purchase, emotion and thought manipulation of trademarking, advertising-speak and the nomenclature of aspirational consumer branding. From the ‘time-release bio-feedback pill’ and ‘ventilung’ asthma tablets to the ‘lavendular lo-enviro-pact washing liquid’, BLACCXN® registered trademarks and products litter the narrative like the freckles on the face of an advertising image to remind you that the sun really does shine brighter in the BLACCXN universe.

And there is no easy way out of this Huxleyan paradise: at the end of the day, the safety, security and day-to-day predictability of happiness as market-researched, defined, targeted, packaged, branded and sold by BLACCXN and its three or four metacorp rivals, combined with their encompassing sway over every practical aspect of contemporary living, may just prove too cosy, too convenient, too conforming and too too complex for the ‘normal’ soul to simply break free from over the course of a single adventure.

With the first instalment in their enticingly named ‘less than one percent’ series (this because it ostensibly will appeal to less than one percent of the population) publishers terra incognita have got off to a promising start…

Sebastian Michael

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pp288 on quality paper
with 8 pages of lithographic prints by
Cornford & Cross

Further Information: contact terra incognita