On Nobody's Empire by Stuart Murdoch

of Belle and Sebastian

Having reviewed Nobody’s Empire, I was left with lots more I wanted to say.

But because some of it is about woozy POV, and some of it is about obscure indie stuff, it didn’t fit the generous 800 words allotted me by the Guardian.

Let’s deal with the POV first, because it’s interesting, and there’s something to be learned from it.

Although published by Faber, and clearly edited with care, there are signs in the novel — both to its advantage and disadvantage — that the writer didn’t go through a Creative Writing MA.

In terms of plotting, one of the whole story’s most appealing aspects is how desultory some of the scenes and sequences are. There are dead ends which a more plot-savvy writer would never have pursued.

One sequence has the main character, Steven, setting off by public transport to find a Californian record store that, when he gets there, he finds is shut. End of chapter. End of sequence.

In another chapter, a girl he’s met at a gig comes round to his rented apartment, drinks a cup of tea and leaves. We don’t see her again. There was some brief sexual tension, of a recognisably Belle and Sebastian B-side type, but it’s a narrative fail. A character appears and disappears just as people do in life; not as they do in tightly structured first novels.

It’s in the POV of the book that there’s a downside, although I’m not sure heavy fixing would have helped.

Each chapter starts off in a present moment, like a journal entry detailing where the writer is.

I’m so tired today, I feel battered.

But the meat of most of the chapters is a retrospective look at a scene or series of scenes, some extending more than a day.

Chapter 33 begins in generalized retrospective time.

When I go to sleep at night and when I wake up, I get these funny moments when my mind gets loose and starts racing.

But a page or so letter it settles down to the journal-like form.

Janey and Samir came round yesterday.

The events of yesterday are related. But then, without a section break, we get —

The next day finds Richard doing his yoga, and me on a bus.

Now, this may be picky but there’s no way to get from yesterday (which ends at midnight before today, the day on which the I-narrator is narrating) to the next day (which begins just after midnight of a day the I-narrator is looking back on from a later day).

A diary entry can only run up until 23:59:59.

Stuart Murdoch has put his narrator into one of a series of days and then invisibly whisked him off to some unhitched point later on.

Who, even among experienced readers, is going to notice this?

Probably no-one.

But there was clearly an editorial decision to stick with the day-by-day account of events, as the affable overall form, and not to fuss too much about how this slipped into what is often a more distanced, retrospective first person narration looking back over significant life events — which are more easily recognised as significant because of the intervening period of lifetime.

I think it’s far less likely this slippage would have got past the second or third draft of an MA or MFA produced novel.

Rather than make me question the narrative aplomb or flakiness of Nobody’s Empire, this has made me wonder about the formalising tendencies of Creative Writing as a university discipline.

For a long time, I’ve believed that Consistent Point of View is the contemporary equivalent of the 18th Century’s Rhyming Couplets. (Those of Dryden, Pope, Swift and fifty more poets and poetasters.)

POV is something we take for granted as a masterable skill. It has to be done, and has to be done well, and has to be seen to be done well.

I wrote about this in August —

When I was writing comics, I realised that there were far fewer issues with POV than there are in novels. The overall narrator of a comic (I’m going to call them the invisible organizing narrator, and come back to that another time) — the invisible organizing narrator of the comic is the form itself; the comic is told by the comic.

The thought bubbles that tell us what a character is thinking — the reader doesn’t worry who is giving that to them. This is the case even if that specific character’s inner world hasn’t been visited before and will never be visited again.

This freedom and lack of narrative angst is more like the early days of the novel, before Flaubert and Henry James began to make an issue of POV. I don’t want to digress on this right now.

The POV of Nobody’s Empire is the written account, by Stephen, not a trained writer, of his past, recent or distant. Probably distant but being related in a way that mimics being recent. (Stuart Murdoch is 56; his main character is going through the early stages of an extended adolescence.) The frailties of Stephen/Stuart’s POV fit the frailties of his life. (Much of the book is about what ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome gives to and takes from a creative life.) I don’t think they’re calculated literary effects, and for that reason they have a greater realism.

A novel that was better produced would be less loveably ramshackle.

As is the case with Belle and Sebastian’s discography, and how it fits with Nobody’s Empire — which I’ll get onto tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here’s a paragraph from late in the book when Stephen has finally met his special someone —

A girl was there. She stayed very quiet, just smiled. She gave the impression that she could have been a ballerina from inside a music box. Or someone who had just narrowly failed the audition to be in a Spangles advert in the seventies. Or somewhere in between. She sat and listened. Mystery girl.

If this is too cutie for you, you’re unlikely to take to the novel; but if you love it, if it makes you feel the same kind of comfort and joy that a song like ‘Dog on Wheels’ or ‘Dylan in the Movies’ does, then Nobody’s Empire is for you.

Stuart Murdoch. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer