Stuart Murdoch’s mostly true novel about his chronic illness dazzles with indie charm

I cried the first time I listened to the Belle and Sebastian song “Nobody’s Empire.” From the 2015 album “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance,” it is a perfect blend of raw emotion and deeply personal storytelling, twinkling with the Scottish band’s trademark indie pop charm.

That’s the high expectation I had for frontman Stuart Murdoch’s novel of the same name — to be moved to tears. It took many pages to appreciate the rhythm of the book, but I found the wet face I was looking for.

The novel is a fictional account of Murdoch’s own struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a disease that nearly claimed his life. We begin with narrator Stephen sorting out his thoughts as he ends a lengthy psychiatric hospital stay and begins his new life with a disease that has left him too exhausted to return to work or study:

“Imagine having the first day of a cold or the flu every day of your life. Feeling sick and weak and … poisoned every day.”

Those early chapters are, like Stephen’s brain, a foggy mess of his old life, the hospital stay and the new regimen of managing energy levels from his flat in Glasgow in the early ‘90s.

As the narrative finds some cohesion, focusing mainly on the path forward and the people who might make recovery possible, the rhythm improves and the reality of Stephen’s situation becomes clear and concerning. He is stricken most of all with a desire to be defined “not by illness but by other phenomena, even if those phenomena are deities, soft guitar music and undefined lust.”

Alongside close allies also afflicted by ME, but just as often alone, Stephen moves through music venues, churches, childhood homes and hostels as he seeks to define his new life. We learn all the ways Stephen — and by extension Murdoch — copes with his fate through humor, music, faith and friends. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, “Nobody’s Empire” is a romantic world of possibility and youthful yearning.

Belle and Sebastian fans will certainly want to hear Murdoch’s soft tenor as the narrator leads us around Scotland and a monthslong convalescent stay in California. But this story belongs to Stephen, and his voice is his own. He just happens to also be a wisecracking Scottish musician with ME: “Whatever I call my band eventually, it has to be French.” (Belle and Sebastian takes its name from a French TV series.)

Anyone who related to the novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” oozing as it was with hip references and the high of finding your people, will feel at home in “Nobody’s Empire.” So, too, will those who have dealt with “invisible” diseases, disbelieving doctors and the toll they take on mental health. Ultimately, though, it’s a largely autobiographical book about the love of music, and how Belle and Sebastian would emerge from pain and joy and travels and trauma.

Murdoch has a gift, in lyrics and prose, for being poetically plainspoken — like a friend confiding the most offhandedly profound sentiments such as “It’s funny how easy it is to disappear from your own life.”

Murdoch returns often to the theme of being an observer, a tourist in his own experiences, due to his illness: “I’m stuck marveling at the moving world from my seat at the eternal plate-glass window of life.”

In California, he lets readers become a tourist in a (mostly) kind and exciting America, where his search for healing completes a circle that started with a glimpse of God on a piano bench and previews the unlikely decades of touring to come: “Music could be my home address.”

Nobody’s Empire

By: Stuart Murdoch.

Publisher: HarperVia, 384 pages, $32.