A Review of "Nobody's Empire" by Stuart Murdoch

 

It would be easy to spend a ton of time teasing out where writer/musician Stuart Murdoch ends from where the main character of his debut novel Nobody’s Empire, Stephen Rutherford, begins.

Fans of B&S (that is, those who know enough to abbreviate Belle and Sebastian) will recognize that Murdoch’s novel borrows its title from a tune on 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance that artfully captures Murdoch’s struggles with ME, or Myalgic encephalomyelitis (the medically mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome). Yep, his novel’s protagonist and two best friends, Richard and Carrie, also suffer from ME. Both Stuart and Stephen actively engage with questions of faith, albeit with an amorphous notion of god. Stuart went, and Stephen goes, on transformative trips to California. And both were saved by rock and roll. Heck, ignoring the shift from Scotland to Ireland, perhaps there’s even a nod to Joyce and his alter ego Stephen; think of Murdoch’s book as Portrait of the Artist as a Young ME.

But spending a ton of time teasing out such connections would also be a waste.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.