Karen had to learn to do for herself years ago when her beloved Da died, leaving her orphaned and penniless. Working as a high-class prostitute isn’t exactly what her parents would have wanted, but she’s good at it, and she’s comfortably situated at the finest bordello in Rapid City, where the girls are well fed and protected from abuse; any man that tries to cross the line will face the wrath of the proprietress herself: Madame Damnable. The employees of the Hôtel Mon Cherie are even allowed to keep forty percent of their considerable wages; Karen plans in a few years to save up enough money to buy her own stable and become a respectable businesswoman.
And then one night the girls are startled by the arrival of the vigilante Merry Lee, badly-wounded after rescuing one of the many women kept prisoner in the dockside cribs for the sailors’ uses. Hot on their heels is the pimp, Peter Bantle, and his whole posse. Soon Karen’s mostly squared-away life is thrown into a chaos of sadistic flesh-peddlers, secret plots, a US Marshall and his Comanche partner hunting a mysterious figure killing streetwalkers, and most importantly Priya, the half-starved crib-worker Merry Lee rescued who just happens to be the loveliest woman Karen has seen in all her life.
The setting of Rapid City (a fantasy-version of Seattle or San Francisco) in the late 19th century technically puts this book in the Weird Western genre. But with the steam-powered automatons and airships and mind-controlling gauntlets, Elizabeth Bear’s latest novel Karen Memory is one of the most gloriously steampunk books I’ve ever read.
Speaking of Weird West, the first two chapters of this book previously appeared in the collection Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West. The short story “Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle” was one of my favorites, mostly for the tone of the narrator. Karen tries as hard as she can to be refined, but her folksy drawl always shows through, along with her temper and her unflinching way of looking at at life right in the face and saying exactly what she thinks about it. The pace of the book takes some getting used to, since Karen has a very active inner monologue going on. There are quite a few times when the action is put on pause while Karen describes everything around her, including how bad of a fix she’s in and what everyone’s wearing. It can be a little distracting, but never boring, and I loved getting to see things through Karen’s eyes, especially when the book goes into full-on spectacle mode: Rapid City’s market district for instance (with a construction-site automaton being run by an operator who’s showing off for the crowd), or a traveling circus complete with showgirls with mechanical wings and trapeze artists equipped with rocket packs.
Don’t expect a lot of salacious details about Karen’s working life as a prostitute. You’ll get all kinds of information about life in the bordello – along with various hints about what men like and who the favored customers are – but the work itself is just that, work, and not something Karen feels is important enough to dwell on. But the topic isn’t exactly avoided either; the girls of the Hôtel Mon Cherie have exactly zero shame about what they do for a living, and there’s a surprising amount of down-to-earth sensibleness in the fierce Madame Damnable. I particularly liked her reasons for not letting her employees overdo it when drinking, partly because it’s bad for business to get sloppy drunk and make a scene, but mostly because she would never hire a girl who needed to be drunk in order to endure it. Combine that with the Madame’s tendency to swear like a sailor and drive out nasty customers by sheer force of will, and she was almost as appealing a character as Karen herself.
Some would say a whore don’t have no expectation of Heaven. I’d say, if she gives value for cash, she’s got a better shot at God’s blessing than your average banker.
Jesus loved Mary Magdalene. He kicked over tables when He met a moneylender.
One thing you do get a lot of details about is Karen’s growing relationship with Priya. I think it takes Karen exactly two seconds to fall for her, and maybe a couple of chapters for her to realize this herself and then start trying to figure out what she’s going to do about it (but not about how to hide it; Karen really couldn’t give a damn about whether her feelings are acceptable to society). Then it’s just a matter of her dancing around the topic for a few dozen pages, going back and forth between keeping a careful distance and dreaming about the kind of home they could make together. Karen’s desperately afraid of scaring away the new love of her life, until Priya makes it clear that she feels exactly the same way and cares even less about what anyone else thinks about it. It’s all kinds of adorable.
The rest of the book is an entertaining mishmash of elements straight from the dime-store novels that Madame Damnable’s girls read in the evening: jailbreaks and roof-top chases, a Jack-the-Ripper style serial killer and an international conspiracy, a last-second escape by dirigible and an automaton-assisted rescue of a cat from a burning building. The plot starts out slow, but when it gets going it moves at a breakneck pace until the last chapter and a perfect two-sentence ending. I can only hope that Elizabeth Bear has gotten a taste for this kind of fiction, because now she has a fantastic setting and a whole slew of fascinating characters, and I’d love to see her expand any one of them in future books.