Nobody’s Empire is the first novel by Stuart Murdoch, the front man of the successful indie pop band Belle and Sebastian. Set in Glasgow and LA in the early 1990s, it is ostensibly the written testimony of Stephen, a youngish man living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, an awful disease that is under-researched and routinely misunderstood. 

The novel is loosely autobiographical and arranged in short chapters, aptly reflecting the short periods of energy which ME patients tend to experience. We follow Stephen as he finds God, sets up an ME support group, briefly attends university, pines after various women and writes a few songs. A good enough premise, perhaps, and yet the reader is given hardly anything to enjoy or savour from page to page. It is entirely synoptic: scenes are narrated in summary; whole chapters come and go with hardly a single detail being provided. Characters we cannot visualise enter rooms to conduct brief conversations with other faceless characters: mostly to say they are ‘ok’ or that someone else is ‘great’ or ‘amazing’. Stephen’s flatmate Richard, for instance, is described only as ‘quite tall’, ‘black’ and ‘pretty good-looking’. Everything else about him, including any flaws or complexities, is left for us to invent.

The word ‘thing’ occurs again and again: the pull tab on a tin of sardines is a ‘little key thing’, a statue in a garden is an ‘ornamental thingy’. We are obviously meant to find this winsome, yet the experience of reading a novel in which the author does his