Nobody’s Empire
Stuart Murdoch
Reviewed by Laura Baliman
Nobody’s Empire is the debut novel by Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of Glasgow’s famed band Belle & Sebastian. Like Murdoch himself, the protagonist Stephen deals with chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as M.E.), an illness that is misunderstood, under-researched and for which there are few known treatments. (This was especially true in the 90s, when the novel is set.) Stephen journeys from Glasgow to California, inciting a spiritual and musical awakening, in which: God and songwriting help him to cope with his illness.
We hear Murdoch’s experiential knowledge of music and M.E. through Stephen, whose characterisation and inner monologue are detailed and feel authentic. Complex and misunderstood illnesses like M.E. can be difficult to convey through non-fiction, but the novel seems to be the perfect ground for Murdoch to translate his knowledge of illness, God, music, and all the ways they intertwine.
Nobody’s Empire leans heavily on plot, particularly through Stephen’s travels. It is a pilgrimage centred around Stephen’s trip to California – an antithetical location to Glasgow – a place where he can think through his life and his pain. Stephen’s father was a sailor, and he notes that ‘perhaps there was something in this trip I was on that was oddly analogous to my dad’s experiences.’ All of Stephen’s travels, across oceans but also within cities, represent an inner journey through his illness and the life that it complicates. It’s significant that Scotland’s social welfare system is what allows Stephen to work through things in this way, something that the UK is losing rapidly.
Murdoch’s plot comes to a head in the breakdowns of his protagonist – the central points of the novel that illustrate the difficulty and distress of chronic and mental illness. When Stephen becomes suicidal, sentences split and break, become shorter and lose their fluidity and adornations: ‘I saw suicide…I had never felt like this in my life. I couldn’t even think of God. God was nowhere. There was darkness beneath the bed I was lying on. It was everywhere.’ Murdoch’s broken-down syntax echoes that of the plot, which splinters and fractures when Stephen’s life and sickness become too much to bear.
Despite the pilgrimage, there is no real end-point of the novel. There is a futility in it, a cynicism, as when he travels to a record shop that has shut down, and must simply ‘wait in the sun and the dust for a bus back’. Nobody’s Empire is a kind of Bildungsroman that doesn’t build towards anything, a book about growing pains – or growing with pain – something that Stephen echoes in a monologue:
‘This is not one of those stories where everyone gets what they want, or even remotely what they want, and goes happily into the sunset, and every day is better than the one before. Does anyone even write those kinds of stories anymore? This is not a heavenly story, this is a slow human story, where people keep trundling along…’
A ‘slow human story’ is certainly accurate: the breakdowns, the journeying, the internal crises: everything is very human, and whilst sometimes un-hopeful, the humanity of the text is endlessly comforting.
It’s significant that Stephen is never cured, and impactful to read a text about chronic illness without wellness as the conclusion or even as the goal, because that might never be possible. Murdoch does not try to over-explain M.E. – in part because knowledge of the condition in the 90s was even more limited than it is now – but this also makes the novel humane. Nobody’s Empire is more about Stephen than it is about M.E., and indeed an essential part of a successful piece of work about disability is that the human is pedestaled and prioritised, which Murdoch accomplishes through dense and thoughtful characterisation of the protagonist. Stephen is taken aback by a monk’s statement that ‘we are not these bodies’ – a rallying cry for the novel as a whole, which situates itself far more in Stephen’s mind than his body: an exulting of a person and a being.
The crux of the novel is that the world is not made for those with M.E., as Stephen cannot access university, workplaces or communities. When speaking of the American Dream, Stephen notes that ‘it seemed to be the place where life happened, and we were getting the sloppy seconds.’ Disdaining the ‘sloppy seconds’ of life that chronically ill people are left with, Murdoch positions music as something they can have. Music is not angled as a career or as potential global success (his songs and gigs fail him as often as they succeed). They’re more of a solace, a salve, a beauty, a reason for being. Murdoch’s prose about music is his most potent and colourful: ‘Jeez, I’m listening to this stuff in the living room and the purple starlight is pouring in over the blackened trees’.
God is positioned similarly as a solace and a reason for being. Music and God’s ability for creation-ex-nihilo are aligned by Stephen: ‘the experience of music coming from “nothing” was quite similar to how God crept in,’ he thinks. Both music and God ‘creep in’ to the story in this way, making Stephen feel like life is more worth living, and that, whilst he can’t have much in the world, he can have music:
‘I sometimes wonder how close creativity and God are, whether they are close to being the same thing. They showed up at roughly the same time. They both give me a sense of: This might be ok. This is bigger than you. You are part of something. Give in to it. This is the tip of the iceberg.’
Just as in his writing on suicide, Murdoch’s syntax breaks and splinters here, but the brevity of his sentences has the opposite effect: of conviction and hope. Much of Murdoch’s most lucid prose appears as mantras and manifestations: ‘I can do a thing. I can write about anything. Sing about anything.’ God (or music) might not be able to provide wellness, or a conclusive end-point of the novel’s journey, but they accompany Stephen so that he is never alone. He is with a God, more than he is led by one.
Stephen might feel like he will never really have a place in the world, but God and music make room for him. When Stephen hears a band that is more developed than his, he says, ‘I didn’t feel dispirited; their music was just different, it was all there. I just had to keep working. There is room in the world for endless song’. It is this kind of ‘endlessness’ of God and music that punctuate the depth of solace that the novel brings, both to Stephen himself and the reader. Whilst Stephen’s journeys don’t get him anywhere, and whilst the whole pilgrimage of the novel does not conclude, the possibilities of music and God are infinite.
At the close of the novel, Stephen’s future is uncertain and we don’t know where he’ll end up. But we do know that he can and will fall further and further towards music and God, who will hold him and feed him hope when no one else can. The plot may not conclude in a neat set of knots, but Stephen’s faith, his conviction and his call towards music is distinctly conclusive.
The triumph of this novel is not only in its accessible and powerful prose and plot, but in its sincere representation of chronic illness. Murdoch has spoken about how ‘exhausting’ it is to explain M.E. to non-sufferers; it’s not a simple illness, nor a romantic or dramatic one. To convey this kind of complexity and suffering without idealising or simplifying it is a huge and commendable feat, and it’s likely that his musical prowess has trained him well for this literary context. Murdoch told The Bookseller that ‘I needed [the novel] as much as it needed me’, neatly echoing the message of the novel: that engaging in art can be a great solace for those who are ill, even if it can never be a complete saviour.
Nobody’s Empire is out now with Faber & Faber