Customer Reviews

Alma Cogan: A Novel

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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.

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.

This ambitious if uneven novelization of the aftermath of a once-famous singer, the real-life Alma Cogan, departs of course from the truth that she died in 1966. Here, she lives three decades past her prime, into 1986, and she's therefore able to intersect, indirectly, with another formerly (in)famous British woman, the Moors Murderess Myra Hindley, who twenty years after the child-killing crimes under prison guard leads detectives to a couple of the last remaining bodies never found. As Newcastle-born Burn's the author of an earlier non-fictional account of Peter Sutcliffe, "The Yorkshire Ripper," one assumes his interest in such Northern tragedies attracted him-- I'm not sure if the particularly upsetting sonic link that the final pages of the novel here connects actually happened to tie Alma with Myra, again indirectly.

I'd add that while the British cover played up the Myra-Alma pairing, giving them both equal billing, so to speak, as large pop-art photos, the hardcover American edition, despite its very lurid and less successful hip-60s illustration-- the effect looks like chick-lit trash-- does avoid a rather misleading marketing impression that the Moors Murders share the plot. (The U.S. paperback reveals little, as if expecting American ignorance as to its eponymous subject.) Myra's return to the public eye's only peripherally registered a couple of times in the novel, until near the end for an off-kilter scene, but one still, thankfully for me, rather "off-stage" and reported as if second-hand. Anything more would reveal too much about the climax.

In a detached authorial tone at odds with its vividly described details, the book manages no matter how much is fiction and how much fact to ingeniously contrive situations where Alma confronts, thirty years on, the ghosts of her past. Artist Peter Blake, in the days before the Sgt. Pepper's album cover established his pop-culture prominence, already had done a wonderful depiction of Alma in two guises, and this is reproduced on the flyleaf of the hardcover. It's necessary to have this artwork nearby as you read Alma's encounter with it in the bowels of the Tate Gallery. Burn provides a poignant, yet honestly rendered, confrontation of the woman at fifty-four looking at her celebrated visage from the height of her career: two pop artists facing each other, again indirectly.

This stand-off prepares one for the encounter with a collector,"F McL.," who sets up the climax of this oddly paced, wobbly, unpredictable unfolding of events half-explained by Alma in what purports to be a memoir. I doubt if any celebrity has ever been as ruthlessly candid as she's shown to be in these supposedly revealing pages, but much of the delight of this challenging narrative unfolds in the backdrop. Burn's evocation of the tatty nightclubs, off-stage glitz, and tawdry deals that cemented in a pre-Beatles Britain pop stars together with the older music-hall tradition lingers, the morning after the debauch. And that, in this novel, never quite happens with the detail you'd be waiting for. The whole book, then, holds off the advertised promise of easy fulfillment or lasting pleasure, intentionally perhaps.

I only realized after closing the book that never does Alma reveal what you'd expect most of all in a true memoir-- her loves or lusts. No mention of paramours, or for that matter of belief or its lack, enters this chilly world she lives in. You realize how lonely Alma has always been. She does sound formidably erudite for a woman whom you're presented with as never having had much schooling, but perhaps she had plenty of time for self-improvement in her long twilight years? The lack of logic here puzzled me. This feature appears to me to steadily weaken the novel, for the "voice" of Alma while you hear it channelled appears in a register out of sync with the one you'd expect from a late 1950's second-tier talent on the disposable pop charts and club circuit.

Also, the deracination of her from her Jewish immigrant parents, the lack of detail about her upbringing, makes her seem as if she appeared on stage at ten and never lived off of it? The moral of the story-- if it weren't for the fact that the fragmented narrative's far more concerned with the aftermath of her fame than the burst of fame itself. If not for the inclusion of an art gallery "catalogue entry" about the Blake painting, you'd have next to nothing to go on regarding her career's arc, her specific hits, or her impact on the musical scene. None of this can be sensed from this hermetic tale. It's as if she's shut off.

Still, whether an old folks' home for the once-famous (her mother's there, not her!), sodium-lit night-coach journeys, recalled meetings with such as Sammy Davis, Jr., morning in a dreary chain hotel, glimpses of exurban blight, and an evening in the company of a creepy (if pre-E-Bay) obsessive collectors of her ephemeral past-- they all gain harsh vignettes here. One detail well observed: the collector talks of Alma as he displays the wares he's hoarded always in the third person, even as he shows her his (once her) treasures. I note the other book Burn's credited with before this 1991 novel is a real-life look at the billiards scene, so once again the author's talent for roaming the lower depths behind the garish lights of the stage serve him well.

This isn't an easy read, and despite its brevity unsettles you. It's been compared, in its examination of the long slide down from the heights, to a recent novel (reviewed by me on Amazon US and this blog last month) about Kenneth Anger, Brian Jones, and Bobby Beausoleil by the American author Zachary Lazar, "Sway." Whereas that novel picks up around the point Alma's career would have started its descent, "Alma" brings back the giddy yet hungover time immediately before, the last of the vaudeville and variety act English fare that the Stones and the Beatles supplanted.

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.