'Rid of Me' by Kate Schatz (2007)

Kate Schatz’s short 2007 novel based on PJ Harvey’s second album is a seductive oddity. It’s part of Continuum’s '33 1/3' series of monographs in which an author focuses intensely on one musical album at a time, but it’s the only one, I think, which chooses to do that in the form of fiction. ‘This is not about Rid of Me - it’s because of it’, says Ms Schatz in her Prologue, describing how the experience of listening over and over to Harvey’s music on that vicious 1993 compilation developed into a series of:

Characters, lyrics, and landscapes. Moods, and tones, and those feelings. You begin writing. With each song, to each song, from each song. Around and near and under and then, at some point, it takes a shape. … Chapters like songs, book like an album. It becomes a new story, years of listening spiralled out into new words and meanings.

Each chapter is named from one of Rid of Me’s 14 songs, and begins and ends with the first and last words from its eponymous lyric. Cumulatively they tell the story of Mary and Kathleen (names taken, of course, from the album as well), two young women who flee terrible circumstances and, encountering each other in a roadside bar, set up house in a shack in the darkling woods that both have long regarded from afar – a mythical place of danger and threat becoming a refuge for a pair of marooned souls. Their experience is hallucinatory, violent, and finally redemptive.

Continuum (in Britain the publisher is Bloomsbury) are proud of the design of the 33 1/3 series: the books are slightly larger than A6 size and varied within a uniform style, and Rid of Me is cool black, off-white, and silver-grey. The small size makes reading the book an intimate experience of entering into a tiny imaginative world, appropriate to the story. It is also, naturally, great fun for PJH fans. There is an introductory quote from the maestra herself (not provided specially, don’t be silly) and as well as the quotes from Rid of Me, there are echoes of other songs, especially in the last couple of chapters. The apple tree Mary and Kathleen find on p.102, ‘dripping with fruit, bruised and rotting’ where Mary glimpses in Kathleen an image of ‘the first woman on earth’ harks back to the Biblical allusions of Harvey’s first album, Dry, and especially the imagery of ‘Happy and Bleeding’; on the very last page we get a kind of joint voice declaring ‘this is love, this is love’ as the women reach an ecstatic apotheosis, ‘alone … flying, about to rush down into a pure new space’, and that comes from 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. You could play Polly Bingo with the somewhat phantasmagoric and highly-wrought text, if you felt inclined.

The novel is a work of love, obviously, but just as clearly, it’s an exercise, and an effort. Ms Schatz’s scheme forces her into some odd narrative contortions, perhaps most obviously in the chapter ‘Luna’, where, with no warning, Kathleen, like Harvey’s celestially-obsessed narrator in the original song, addresses the Moon at some length. It’s a bit like twelve-tone music, constrained by rules which don’t always gel into anything naturalistic. Engaging and sometimes moving though it might be, nobody could say the story is remotely convincing; not much of it, in fact, ‘makes sense’ at all.

Thanks to all its virtues, though, Rid of Me is very far from being a waste of money, and another testament to the generative power of Harvey’s work for that of other artists. So I also bought the 33 1/3 volume about the Banshees' Peepshow and will report on that at some point!