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littlesophie's review
5.0
Burn's debut novel is an unflinching look at the creepy, dark undertow of fame and the flipside to supposedly innocent and wonderful post-war Britain. After being disappointed with Graham Swift's Here We Are earlier this year, which is set in the same world of 50s show buisness and seaside town entertainments, Burn's is a much braver and more visionary novel. Deeply disturbing but utterly convincing, Alma Cogan is a freely styled and wildly imaginative masterpiece.
karencorday's review
3.0
Taught in my term abroad Contemporary British Literature class by this total sex bomb late 90's English guy who said absurd, exasperated things like "The sun just reflects off the telly when I'm watching football...YOU call it soccer, love" and "I bet you grew up playing BASKETBALL, didn't you, Miss Corday?" I was in total baffled lust and he obviously had a weird American love/hate thing going on of which I should have taken advantage, but I "had a boyfriend." Of course, it turned out he was feeling up his Texan ex-girlfriend on the sly. Anyway, good book.
arirang's review
4.0
When you stop appearing on television, the assumption, natural enough I suppose, is that you’ve died.
Gordon Burn (1948-2009) was a writer whose work straddled the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction.
Indeed he was originally and quite explicitly influenced by the New Journalism and the 'novel-without-fiction' genre invented by Truman Capote.
His non-fiction works include his debut "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story Of Peter Sutcliffe" (1984) and "Happy Like Murderers: The Story Of Fred And Rosemary West" (1998) as well as "Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion" (2006)
These twin pre-occupations - with infamous serial killers and with fame and celebrity leading to oblivion - came together wonderfully in his first fiction work (although arguably not his first 'novel') Alma Cogan (1991) which won the Whitbread (now Costa Prize) First Novel award.
Alma Cogan is a fictionalised re-imagining of the life of the "Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice", born in 1932, and the highest paid British female entertainer of the 1950s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Cogan), voted "Outstanding British Female Singer" by NME Readers four times between 1956 and 1960. The rise of the Beatles and similar bands made her suddenly unfashionable in the 1960s, although she was personally friends with the band (and even, in some accounts, John Lennon's lover).
That I - and perhaps you reading this - barely recognise her name is part of Burn's point.
In this retelling, Alma did not die of ovarian cancer in 1966, aged just 34, but instead retired and withdrew from public life, and the novel is narrated by her looking back from 1986-7, a time when the police were searching Saddleworth Moor for bodies after the Moors murderers had reportedly confessed to two further crimes.
A key inspiration for the novel is the true fact that in the infamous recording, played in the Moors Murders court, of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey, Cogan's The Little Drummer Boy, can be heard playing on Radio Luxembourg in the background.
Alma opens the novel musing on fame, and in particular encounters with her fans:
’Enduring the bizarre projections of others’ somebody* once said was one of the penalties of game. But that was okay. I was prepared for that.
What I couldn’t handle was [being] terrorised by the instant access that being well known seemed to give me to the complexed, mysterious interior lives of complete strangers. ... the devious dark energies I began to suspect in people ... which of these faces would one day rise to notoriety and have a name put to it?
(* my note: actually a question from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth in an interview in 1974, discussing the latter's experience of fame)
The fictional Alma’s (and the author’s) preoccupation with notorious killers recurs throughout the novel: Dennis Nielsen, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Crippen and Christie, among others, feature and with news of the Saddleworth Moor searches on newspapers and radio/TV intruding into the present day narrative.
And looking back on her own life Alma sees, quoting Nabokov*, ‘a stranger caught in a snapshot of myself'
(* That quote I can not source although it has also been quoted, and attributed to Nabakov, by Pamela Stephenson, and Nabakov did write:
“and in that snapshot I shall be.
My likeness among strangers")
Burn writes wonderfully about the celebrity scene of the 1950s and 1960s, blending real stars (e.g. Sammy Davis Jr.) with fictional lesser-knowns, but equally effectively portrays the sleepy coastal village of Alma’s mid-80s present.
(see quotes at this review https://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/alma-cogan-by-gordon-burn/)
In one nicely meta-fictional touch, Alma visits the Tate to see a 1961 painting of herself done by artist Peter Blake (perhaps best known for the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), and the novel reproduces the catalogue essay with quotes from Blake.
Except that the catalogue entry is fictional, the painting didn’t exist, or at least it didn’t exist in 1961. It was actually painted in the 90s, especially for the novel. As Burn explained in an interview:
Burn's final novel was Born Yesterday, published in 2008, where he attempts to capture in near real-time the events of the Summer of 2007. He said:
The collage of impressions produced in the novel, is as Jonathan Coe has acknowledged ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/03/read-all-about-it-can-fiction-make-sense-of-the-news) the forerunner for the more recent works by himself, Olivia Laing's Crudo and of course Ali Smith's seasonal quartet.
And Gordon Burn's name and legacy lives on in the Gordon Burn Prize for new writing.
http://newwritingnorth.com/projects/the-gordon-burn-prize/
The Gordon Burn Prize seeks to reward a published title (fiction or non-fiction) written in the English language, which in the opinion of the judges most successfully represents the spirit and sensibility of Gordon's literary methods: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; writers of non-fiction brave enough to recast characters and historical events to create a new and vivid reality. Literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading.
see also https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19071134-gordon-burn-and-the-gordon-burn-prize and https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18290023-gordon-burn-prize
Interestingly both Crudo and Autumn were featured (although neither won)
Overall - an important book from an important and innovative author.
Gordon Burn (1948-2009) was a writer whose work straddled the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction.
Indeed he was originally and quite explicitly influenced by the New Journalism and the 'novel-without-fiction' genre invented by Truman Capote.
His non-fiction works include his debut "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story Of Peter Sutcliffe" (1984) and "Happy Like Murderers: The Story Of Fred And Rosemary West" (1998) as well as "Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion" (2006)
These twin pre-occupations - with infamous serial killers and with fame and celebrity leading to oblivion - came together wonderfully in his first fiction work (although arguably not his first 'novel') Alma Cogan (1991) which won the Whitbread (now Costa Prize) First Novel award.
Alma Cogan is a fictionalised re-imagining of the life of the "Girl with the Giggle in Her Voice", born in 1932, and the highest paid British female entertainer of the 1950s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Cogan), voted "Outstanding British Female Singer" by NME Readers four times between 1956 and 1960. The rise of the Beatles and similar bands made her suddenly unfashionable in the 1960s, although she was personally friends with the band (and even, in some accounts, John Lennon's lover).
That I - and perhaps you reading this - barely recognise her name is part of Burn's point.
In this retelling, Alma did not die of ovarian cancer in 1966, aged just 34, but instead retired and withdrew from public life, and the novel is narrated by her looking back from 1986-7, a time when the police were searching Saddleworth Moor for bodies after the Moors murderers had reportedly confessed to two further crimes.
A key inspiration for the novel is the true fact that in the infamous recording, played in the Moors Murders court, of the torture of Lesley Ann Downey, Cogan's The Little Drummer Boy, can be heard playing on Radio Luxembourg in the background.
Alma opens the novel musing on fame, and in particular encounters with her fans:
’Enduring the bizarre projections of others’ somebody* once said was one of the penalties of game. But that was okay. I was prepared for that.
What I couldn’t handle was [being] terrorised by the instant access that being well known seemed to give me to the complexed, mysterious interior lives of complete strangers. ... the devious dark energies I began to suspect in people ... which of these faces would one day rise to notoriety and have a name put to it?
(* my note: actually a question from Joyce Carol Oates to Philip Roth in an interview in 1974, discussing the latter's experience of fame)
The fictional Alma’s (and the author’s) preoccupation with notorious killers recurs throughout the novel: Dennis Nielsen, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, Crippen and Christie, among others, feature and with news of the Saddleworth Moor searches on newspapers and radio/TV intruding into the present day narrative.
And looking back on her own life Alma sees, quoting Nabokov*, ‘a stranger caught in a snapshot of myself'
(* That quote I can not source although it has also been quoted, and attributed to Nabakov, by Pamela Stephenson, and Nabakov did write:
“and in that snapshot I shall be.
My likeness among strangers")
Burn writes wonderfully about the celebrity scene of the 1950s and 1960s, blending real stars (e.g. Sammy Davis Jr.) with fictional lesser-knowns, but equally effectively portrays the sleepy coastal village of Alma’s mid-80s present.
(see quotes at this review https://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/alma-cogan-by-gordon-burn/)
In one nicely meta-fictional touch, Alma visits the Tate to see a 1961 painting of herself done by artist Peter Blake (perhaps best known for the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album), and the novel reproduces the catalogue essay with quotes from Blake.
Except that the catalogue entry is fictional, the painting didn’t exist, or at least it didn’t exist in 1961. It was actually painted in the 90s, especially for the novel. As Burn explained in an interview:
The painting, created especially for the book, was supposed to go on the cover, but Peter works so slowly that his picture wasn’t ready when the publisher needed it for the dustjacket. Luckily he finished it in time for it to be inserted into the body of the book. By then, the publisher had come up with the Warhol-esque series of portraits which were used on the jacket.And the novel ends with an encounter with an obsessive super-fan, who refers to Alma the star in the third person in her presence as if perceives no connection between the mid 50s lady before him and the girl with the giggle in her voice of his dreams, and where Alma, is his extensive collection, discovers one particularly morbid exhibit revealing her connection to the Moors murders.
Burn's final novel was Born Yesterday, published in 2008, where he attempts to capture in near real-time the events of the Summer of 2007. He said:
I’d had this idea about taking the Capote/Mailer non-fiction novel thing to its ultimate, which would also involve how things have changed with rolling news. The idea was to find a story, and the moment the news explosion happened to go there and write about it, turn it into a novel in the way that happens all the time through rolling news, newspapers, blogging. And to turn it around fast, so that the novel came out while the news coverage was still fresh in people’s minds.As it transpired there was no one defining 'news explosion' that summer, although there was the end of Tony Blair's premiership, the Madeline McCann abduction and the Glasgow airport bombings.
The collage of impressions produced in the novel, is as Jonathan Coe has acknowledged ( https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/03/read-all-about-it-can-fiction-make-sense-of-the-news) the forerunner for the more recent works by himself, Olivia Laing's Crudo and of course Ali Smith's seasonal quartet.
And Gordon Burn's name and legacy lives on in the Gordon Burn Prize for new writing.
http://newwritingnorth.com/projects/the-gordon-burn-prize/
The Gordon Burn Prize seeks to reward a published title (fiction or non-fiction) written in the English language, which in the opinion of the judges most successfully represents the spirit and sensibility of Gordon's literary methods: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past; writers of non-fiction brave enough to recast characters and historical events to create a new and vivid reality. Literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading.
see also https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19071134-gordon-burn-and-the-gordon-burn-prize and https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18290023-gordon-burn-prize
Interestingly both Crudo and Autumn were featured (although neither won)
Overall - an important book from an important and innovative author.
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