Jagannath – Karin Tidbeck

Is sci fi having some kind of steampunk cyborg moment, or is it simply coincidence that I read Karin Tidbeck just after Ted Chiang?
 
If Chiang’s “Exhalation” playing with the idea of a piston-driven non-organic life form left me cold, Tidbeck’s penchant for amalgamating the organic with the mechanical left me queasy. Human-machine love and engine cables clung to by blubbery flesh tend to creep me out. If you like weird tales, you’ll probably like these, but I found there was too much freakishness for its own sake. All the fat and flab seemed gratuitously excessive to me.
 
Human relationships in these stories with abnormal creatures of unnatural birth would work better if they were more relatable, or exciting. But that is not the Swedish way, I think, and you certainly get a strong feel of Nordic otherness and Sehnsucht.
 
But then there’s “Rebecka”, which knocks the spots off any story I’ve read this year. I occasionally do preliminary judging for a short story contest: I would award this one first prize. It packs something massive into its eight pages.
 
It starts off with a cracking guess-how-things-ended-up-this-way scene and thus we meet Sara, reluctant confidante to the troubled Rebecka, after whose suicide attempts she is always cleaning up: “the worst kind of friendship, held together by pity.”
 
Added to the obvious tension of the scenario are Sara’s impatient, sardonic humour and the sharp minds of both women, but that’s not all.
 
Sara recalls a phone conversation—before her friend’s first attempt to kill herself—in which Rebecka asserts having met the living Lord in a church.
 
The truly wonderful thing that happens in this conversation is a shift that thrusts a huge ambiguity into the reader’s mind. At first, Sara appears to be humouring Rebecka, but then she starts talking as if Christ’s second coming were an established and fairly recent fact.
 
When we learn what torture Rebecka suffered at the hands of her husband, we take her more seriously and her suicidal nature seems more than comprehensible. So that when the strangely level-headed Rebecka tells Sara that “the Lord is fucking with me” and won’t let her die, we don’t know where this could possibly lead.
 
That it does lead somewhere conclusive and unexpected is superbly accomplished by Tidbeck.