Alma CL

by Gordon Burn

Book Overview

How does it feel to be never allowed to die? In his classic d but novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395634148
• ISBN13: 9780395634141
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Grim, sardonic and creepy

One of the previous reviewers is wrong: I have occasionally read Hello! magazine (in the barber, when there's nothing else except the Sports sections) and I've also read this book and enjoyed it. The Kirkus review above is presumably by an American reviewer - you can tell from the tone of complacent ignorance that he or she just didn't get this book. It's difficult to hear 'Alma Cogan' at full volume unless you've actually been immersed in her music, which is for the most part relentlessly and gratingly cheerful (except for her remarkable final album 'Alma', recorded not long before her death, and which is full of odd shadows and ominous yearnings). Burn's Cogan is a thoroughly believable British showbiz survivor. Anyone who's read the tortured diaries of much-loved comic actor Kenneth Williams will see that Burn has exactly captured the tone of muffled self-disgust common to showbiz stars who were deeper and more interesting than their public personae allowed them to be. Without giving too much away, the story brings the fictional Cogan to a symbolic encounter with a notorious British criminal couple, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, aka the Moors Murderers, who killed a number of young children in the North of England in the 1960s for no better reason than that Brady (and, arguably, Hindley) was criminally insane. My only problem with the book, and the story, and indeed Burn's approach in general, is that it's essentially journalistic: he aims to show us that life is not nearly as happy and cheerful and lovely as we imagined, and that underneath the surface normality there are all kinds of dark and ugly impulses at work, etc., which is something that life tends to teach people anyway - but then Burn does nothing with this knowledge apart from stare into the darkness, apparently hypnotised by it. It's like leading you down into the pit and leaving you there. The same is true of the other books by him that I've read, his biographies of the British serial killers Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West; they're brilliant at evoking the lives that those people led, but they are also deeply depressing and stultifying to read. You put them down gasping for air. Burn is a writer that everybody should read once, preferably early in life when you probably do have a few illusions that need shattering, but there's something immature about his apparently relentless need to be iconoclastic. It came as no surprise to me that he has a great admiration for another gifted but eternally adolescent artist, Damien Hirst, with whom he has collaborated on books. 'Alma Cogan' is a good read, though, suitable for an express train journey through hell - you don't want to linger, but the ride has a grisly fascination.

Burn burns darkly

Gordon Burn is probably unique. Not an easy phrase to throw around, is it? We live, I fear, in a world where 'awe' and 'splendour' is all too simple to achieve and compartmentalise. Mundane products are advertised with grandiose soul stirring taglines. The world, as David Thewlis's character in 'Naked' says, has been explained to us, and we're bored with it. Consequently, to sell anything to anyone, we are promised The Experience Of A Lifetime (TM) regardless of whether we're talking a new car, a pair of sunglasses or the latest Pizza Hut pizza. Gordon Burn, you can tell, doesn't agree with that. All his stuff says; Yeah? You reckon we're so great? Well just take a little look through this hole and then tell me what you think. He gives us a torch with dodgy batteries and chucks us head first into the dark, and lets us piece it all together slowly, languidly, with (as in Happy Like Murderers) seemingly mundane detail, until we have everything and just as we begin to put the bits together, the torch begins to flicker, and... Alma Cogan takes a bold step forward into a fully realised fantasy world of alternative history and exposes the fickle nature of fame for a long-departed, nearly-forgotten star. The ending creeps up with superb tension and desperate ugliness. No-one who reads Hello! or OK! has ever read this book. As I say, the man's a genius.

A stunning debut.

Alma Cogan was a real-life British singing star in the 50's, a friend of the Beatles and most of the other stars of the time, she died in 1966 aged only 34. Here Gordon Burn has written a what-if novel where Alma plays out her twilight years living off the generosity of others and remembering the past. She seems happy to remain in the shadows but there are those who haven't forgotten her.The story recounts Almas rootless life and her showbusiness memories which are particulary evocative of a lost age, but just when you think you are holding the pieces of the plot in Gordon Burns extraordinary book, it moves away from you in a sinewy sinister dance. The effect is unsettling, even disturbing.The pace of the book is perfect, a slow descent into the darkness where you know something unspeakable awaits and that thing is the final terrible indictment of fame where the edges are blurred between celebrity and murderous evil.This is a book you will find yourself pondering over long long after you have completed the journey through it.