Harper Via
Review by George Yatchisin
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.
Stephen’s story is so engaging, so directly yet artfully told, that to read Nobody’s Fool merely to hashmark roman à clef points would be foolhardy. (OK, one more: it’s hard not to giggle when Stephen thinks, “Carrie says my trouble is I’m too ‘subtle.’ I’m ok with subtle though. No one ever died of subtlety.” After all, B+S are pigeonholed for being a bit twee.) As a chronicle of Stephen in some ways not just growing up but coming to life again, the book quietly roots for all of us to do the same, suffers of ME or not (we all suffer from too much me if not ME, don’t we?). As he slowly warms back up to the world, specifically on a trip to California so he can briefly escape the frigid winters of his hometown Glasgow, he writes, “I didn’t want the small talk; I wanted the big talk.”
That means talk of creation, its nuts and bolts. (“I keep playing the two chords and start writing words about me and a girl and some political grievances.”) Talk of love, its why and often awkward how. (“It was like trying to open a tin of sardines when the little key thing had fallen off. It was tricky.”) And talk of a greater being. God-talk makes escaped-Catholic me ever anxious and wary, but Murdoch has a knack for open-mindedness—Stephen goes to a more traditional church, a Buddhist center, even the Hare Krishna, which he and Richard attend for the free food but still end up in discussions about how to save their souls. Much of his prayer reads more like offerings to the muse that slowly begins to bring him songs. My guess is many creatives (if you pardon the gig economy sheen of that word) know exactly what he means. It also signifies that what cracks Stephen open at one point is hearing the church carol “In the Bleak Midwinter,” for he thinks, “Whoever had written that hymn or was responsible for that music was speaking to a part of my mind that wasn’t my daily mind, it was a deeper mind, and I’d been found out.”
Because, who would have guessed, music is the soul of Nobody’s Fool. Every time Stephen considers it, from his recollections as a teenage show junkie (but only the music was his drug) to his painstaking walk through building a mixtape for a crush (whom he never speaks to but in “cassette”) to his own fledgling performances, the book comes to thrilling life. ME doesn’t stand a chance.
Take the several-page passage about that mixed tape. Here’s just a delicious taste of it:
I’m listening to this stuff in the living room and the purple starlight is pouring in over the blackened trees because I can’t get up to put the light on, and everything sounds so great that I find myself with a slight dampening of the eye. Is this girl really worth all this magic? She deserves to hear it, and the grace and the magic of this little sequence of glory is all that I can offer as a match for her beauty and life. It’s all I have, girl. And I don’t even know your name.
Of course this passage is too ripe, but that’s the damn point—who hasn’t felt that way, or wanted to feel that way? Just wanted to feel? Nobody’s Empire certainly will make you feel, as it’s impossible not to care for Stephen, Richard, Carrie, and a host of other well-defined characters along the novel’s way, in particular his American fling Janey he calls “the punk Jean Seberg.” One of the tricks of living with ME is to act like you don’t have it—when Stephen’s at his strongest, he can be sure to rest up and be on when that’s what’s required of him. When he finally starts performing some of his songs, he quickly manages to do so without too much self-consciousness. But he also realizes that’s in a way hiding part of who he is.
This novel attests to how embracing our weaknesses gives us all strength. Especially if things can end at a party of up-and-coming and established indie rockers harmonizing on a kumbaya-like sing-along of the perfect pop-rock chestnut, Big Star’s “September Gurls.”
