Pop music, by its very nature, is something that has to be instantly graspable, is almost always only going to be important to people’s lives for a very short time, will be disposed of, and then only comes back as memory and nostalgia. So there’s nothing significant, in the sense of ..creating a work of art...there was no pretense you could do important things with pop music. On the other hand...for those moments, while it is working in people’s lives, it’s incredibly important...people do actually live their lives according to the way in which pop codes certain sorts of emotions and moods...for that moment when you’re in love with a song the song is actually defining how you’re in love with everything else.

_{—SIMON FRITH}

Thirteen years after John Lennon’s murder, violence against celebrities has become for the nineties what political assassination was for the sixties—an accepted byproduct of the times that we barely bother to question. Back in 1975, audiences couldn’t figure out why, at the end of Robert Altman’s Nashville, it was Ronee Blakley’s country-and-western queen, and not the presidential candidate, who was shot. Today, when we read about the obsessed fan who broke into the model Cindy Crawford’s New York apartment and lived there for two weeks while she was away, it doesn’t strike us an aberration, but as a fulfillment of a certain strain of craziness that’s loose. We’ve become conditioned by Hinckley’s shooting of Reagan to “impress” Jodie Foster, by the murder of the young actress Rebecca Schaefer by one of her fans, by the woman who keeps breaking into David Letterman’s house, by the way celebrity-stalker stories have become standard tabloid fodder. More than ever before celebrities themselves, rather than the music they make or the TV shows and movies they star in, have become the vehicles for private fantasies.

I was terrorized by the instant access that being well-known seemed to give me to the complexed, mysterious interior lives of complete strangers—people whose settled, unrippled surfaces...concealed echoing chasms, recesses, sumps, and unpredictable currents; a whole uncharted subaqueous existence...What is it they say? ‘Fire lies hidden in wood. ’ Well that’s the sort of thing I’m reaching towards here. That puts in a nutshell the sort of potentials, the devious dark energies, I began to suspect in people.

That voice belongs to the heroine of Alma, the stunning first novel by the British journalist Gordon Burn. Alma is only 205 pages, but its ambitions and its subject make it a big book. Burn uses the pretext of a fictional memoir by a real person, Alma Cogan, the British pop singer who died of cancer in 1966, for a meditation on fame, fan worship, and how the shadowy, illusory nature of pop culture feeds our fantasies of celebrity. Burn mixes fact and fiction in a way that would likely swallow up a lesser writer. It’s not daring enough for Burn to imagine that Alma Cogan didn’t die in 1966; the book’s other subject is the most nightmarish crime of 20th century Britain: the Moors Murders, which, since they involve the killing of children, are rife for queasy ex- ploitation. But Burn’s bag isn’t ghoulishness or showboating, and he’s tackled a subject so entwined with the culture that surrounds us everyday that, next to Alma, even the good serious novels that put real people in fictional settings begin to seem like stunts. (I’d except Geoff Ryman’s recent, relatively unheralded Was). When it was published in Britain (under the title Alma Cogan), the novel caused a sensation; appearing here in hardcover last year (Houghton Mifflin was the publisher), it sank without a trace. Most of the American reviewers said that the novel wouldn’t matter to American readers since they didn’t know who Alma Cogan was, or they complained that Alma’s voice wasn’t authentic. No pop singer, they said, could have a voice as intelligent and erudite as this, which just goes to show that celebrity fantasies come in all sizes.

Part of what Burn is trying to get at here is that we’ve become so used to thinking about celebrities in fantasy terms—fed by the images of glamour photography or the cliched terms of profiles dished out by hack journalists or inventions by the stars themselves—that we’ve no way of knowing who they really are. Burn’s Alma is an ironic reflection of the way we construct identities for our idols from the images presented to us. The scary undercurrent of Alma is the notion that celebrities have no way of knowing who we really are, either:

They weren’t monsters. They could be sweet, the fans. But they were ruthless. They wanted to be your best friend....No matter how casual, placid, sober, offhand or unimpressed these people looked, they were all, almost without exception, when you got close to them, men and women, throbbing and pounding and exploding inside; inwardly erupting.

You’d place your hand on a broad shoulder...and find that; under its cardboard like jacket, the shoulder fluttered like a small bird, quivered like a fish....

The fans’ cool exteriors are no more deceptive than Alma’s own composed appearance, which gives no hint of nerves so bad she vomits before each performance. And she’s not immune from the same curiosity they have. She tells a story about entertaining at a Windsor Castle Christmas party and not being able to resist placing her hands on Queen Elizabeth’s waist to steer her into a conga line, all the while trying to glean what she can from this forbidden contact. Alma’s feelings about her fans are as contradictory as the gift packages they leave near the stage doors of the theatres she plays: sheep and cow innards for her dog, wrapped in newspaper on which her admirers have scrawled messages like “Have a grand week.’’ Alma isn’t a poison-pen letter to the public about the burden of fame and the repulsiveness of fans, like Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Burn’s heroine is sickened by the violence people are capable of (though she refuses to be shocked). The novel is so affecting because, in Alma’s case, that refusal comes from someone who still yearns for the world, though she’s largely removed herself from it.

The early life that Burn sketches for Alma (which, reportedly, corresponds pretty closely to the real Alma Cogan’s origins) is a classic rags-to-riches tale but with a couple of twists: instead of being pushed toward the spotlight by eager parents, the young Alma goes willingly, and the artifice of show business only makes her earthy, slightly absurd roots, take hold more firmly. Alma, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, has a childhood filled with tap-dancing lessons and frequent trips to the local movie palace. Her hobby, she tells us, was practicing her autograph. By the time she’s a star, the glamorous life she’s living is what you might expect out of a lottery winner who’s too settled in old ways to give them up. “Sometimes,” Alma says, “in the mornings when I was pulling down £500 for playing a week in Grimsby or Stockton or Wakefield, I would throw on a headscarf and a coat belonging to the owner of the digs where we were staying and slip out...and climb aboard the buses taking the cleaners, mill-girls and factory hands to work. I’d sit in the fugged sleepy atmosphere, ingest the smell of newsprint and tobacco, and bask in the anonymity.” The impromptu, star-studded after-parties she throws at the flat she shares with her mother (parties for which the real Alma Cogan was famous) become meccas for such homey diversions as steak-and-egg fry-ups and music hall sing-alongs.

Burn is amazingly vivid in presenting the mood of Britain at the time Alma became a star. Buoyed by the fifties postwar optimism (the mood the decade’s Angry Young Men would later burrow through), and possessed of a brassy, imitation-American style, Alma belonged to the group of second-string pop singers whose American counterparts included the likes of Frankie Laine and Patti Page. No number had enough heartache to defeat the cheery front she presented. Television helped spread Alma’s fame by way of her own weekly program. Her appearance (bouffed-up black hair, and dresses so sequined and bugle-beaded and billowed they stood up on their own) verged on the cartoonish; her manner (energetic and frankly pleased to be famous) was accessible, reassuring, recognizable. “I was a work of conscious and total artifice,” she says. “I thought that part of whatever appeal I had lay in the fact that I looked totally artificial, but was totally real.”

Alma’s stay at the top of the heap was as brief as the optimism that descended on Britain with the end of coupon-rationing. She didn’t end up destitute, but she was swept aside when rock and roll burst onto the scene. By the time she died of cancer at age thirty-four in 1966, she hadn’t had a hit in five years. In Burn’s version, Alma, instead of dying, realizes her fame is at an end, and chooses to re- turn to the ordinary life she had come from, this time for good. The alternatives—soldiering on as a game has-been or later, returning as a camp icon—both strike her as odious. So she retires to a modest seaside cottage a few hours outside of London, accompanied only by the latest in a long line of miniature Dobermans (each one named Psyche). Her outings are restricted to shopping trips in the village or jaunts with the dog. Her primary contact with the world she’s left behind is the radio. Slimmed down, Alma is almost unrecognizable from her old self. Writing about another celebrity who functions as the novel’s bête noire, Alma says, “It was as if by changing her appearance, and keeping her current identity secret, she has effected some form of escape.” Alma could just as easily be talking about herself. “When you stop appearing on television,” she says, “the assumption, natural enough I suppose, is that you’re dead.”

Alma puts away her self-created image, which she, quoting Nabokov, calls, “A stranger caught in a snapshot of myself,” so that the woman behind that image can get on with her life. What she doesn’t suspect is that this creation has a life of its own. The book is set during the closing days of 1986 when, to give the owners of her cottage a few days’ holiday at their property, Alma journeys to London and tries to connect “Alma Cogan” to her present self, and to resist the pull of her old life.

I live in pleasant, unembittered obscurity and feel at ease for the first time in my own skin. Cleansed of fame and its unquenchable longings....

So how is it that the letters and calls from the way-it-was, way-we-were, return-with-us-now, kiss-and-tell franchisers and packagers are able to get under my skin and breech my defenses so effectively?

If this was a different medium I could use computer graphics to show you: there’d be cartoon crowds, cinemas, taxi-cabs, power stations, chefs hats, VDU’s and supermarket trolleys all spilling out of envelopes and pouring from earpieces of telephones to indicate city energy; city chaos, the invigorating unfakeable urban clang and clamor to which I confess to being helplessly addicted. Caught offguard, it can sometimes tear me up with longing.

That’s the voice of someone in love with what Colin Macinnes in Absolute Beginners called London’s “real, savage splendor.” He was referring to London as it was in the heyday of the late fifties and early sixties, Alma’s heyday. There’s genuine affection in Burn’s description of the London of that time and of the show-biz milieu Alma thrived in. Sure it’s glitzy and shallow, but it also has the all-antennae-alert vitality of a place that’s thrumming with a constant livewire excitement. “ ‘Anger without depth.’ ‘Sensation without commitment,”’ Alma says, quoting the “standard European criticism” of the “Yank style” that thrilled Britain in the fifties:

But together they represented the American formula for success and were preferable every time (so it seemed to me) to depth without energy, and commitment combined with censoriousness and fire-iron solemnity (the British way).

The London of 1986 is a negative image of the world-class hot spot Alma remembers so fondly. There’s a grey miasma over everything, not just the requisite English dankness but, like the atmosphere Ian McEwan describes in The Child in Time, a fitting response to life deep in the throes of Thatcherism. This London is almost a ghost town. The supermarket Alma frequents used to be a theatre she once played. As she shops, she sees former colleagues, long out of the spotlight, wandering aisles like restless spirits beckoned to a familiar place. The nursing home for show biz vets where Alma’s now-senile mother lives is populated by nothing but ghosts. One of the place’s regular diversions is a staged “talk show” where residents, done up in television make-up, reminisce about their careers, with the home’s manager playing interviewer. “Death deserves dignity,” says one of the residents, a former props man to the British comedian Tommy Cooper (who soldiered on to the end, dying on stage in the midst of a live telecast). Alma is ready to dismiss that as an old man’s homily till he shows her his stash of heroin and morphine that, when mixed with whiskey, will spare him an undignified exit.

The pathetic spectacle of the home is a confirmation of the message spelled out by the Jenny Holzer-like neon installation Alma sees in the Tate Gallery: “_{NOSTALGIA IS A PRODUCT OF DISSATISFACTION AND RAGE}.” To Alma, nostalgia is insidious, beckoning her back to a way of life she knows is through with her. What nostalgia she does allow herself to feel is literally closeted away. In her cottage, Alma has turned a minuscule storage room into a makeshift replica of the bars she used to pass time in. The room is decorated with memorabilia from her favorite, long-gone watering hole: mats with beer logos printed on them, advertising plaques, a charity box soliciting change. Alma retires to this room for one hour each evening for a few large gin and tonics and a few songs on the phonograph. The strict boundaries she sets for her nightly trips down memory lane, the refusal to sentimentalize is, like that stash of drugs and booze that awaits the old props man, her way of conferring dignity on death, the death of a way of life she genuinely loved.

But Alma hasn’t retreated so far from the world that she denies its pleasure or comforts. She’s alive to the pleasure of a fast-food restaurant when she’s hungry, to the allure of lighted shop windows seen through a rain storm, and, of course, to the spell cast by pop music. Alma’s only knowledge of what’s currently on the charts comes, she tells us, from what she picks up on the radio or in shops. But she’s still susceptible to what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music. In one of the novel’s most beautiful passages, she confesses:

I still find watching people going about their everyday business to a soundtrack that I can hear but they can’t—because I’m sitting in a car or coach, for example, or standing at a window the way I am now—inexplicably touching, and once or twice—stopping to let an austerely beautiful but unselfconscious (which was the point) mulatto schoolgirl cross at a pedestrian crossing in New Street in Birmingham, while the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” played on the radio and drops of rain shuddered diagonally upward across the windscreen—physically wrenching.

For Alma, the adrenaline rush of pop culture brings into focus what’s deadening in everyday life, as well as the diversions that afford some relief. Alma’s description of her bus ride to London makes the country itself feel uprooted; the “bland agribusiness” landscape makes it seem as if the country’s rural past has been infected by an antiseptic modern anonymity. The only contrast she sees is in the cab of a truck that pulls alongside the bus, where the driver’s dog sleeps contentedly on the passenger seat (many of the book’s most affectionate passages involve dogs) and a bunk space with a quilt awaits behind the driver. But the tranquility of the cab is violated by one of the ruptures that pop culture gives rise to, a newspaper on the dash bearing the headline “_{SHAMEFUL, CYNICAL, AND CRUEL},” and an infamous mugshot of the most hated criminal in 20th century Britain, Myra Hindley.

Myra Hindley and her former lover Ian Brady (the Moors Murderers, as they were known) are a permanent part of the consciousness of every Briton old enough to remember the sixties. In the early part of that decade, Hindley, a typist, and Brady, a clerk with a lengthy juvenile record and a penchant for Nazi fantasies who worked in the same office, were responsible for the disappearance of several children and teenagers from Manchester, England. Their victims were kidnapped, murdered, and buried on the moors that surround the city. They were caught in 1965 after killing Edward Evans in their house, in front of Hindley’s brother-in-law David Smith, whom they forced to help truss up the body. After deluding the pair into thinking he was going along with them, Smith managed to escape and summon the police, who arrived to find Evans’s body. Weeks later, among the confiscated evidence, police found photos of the other victims and of Hindley and Brady picnicking on the Moors near the grave sites, and—the most shocking discovery—a tape-recording of the rape, torture, and murder of ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. Hindley and Brady, who never confessed, were found guilty of three murders. Other people disappeared who were never found, until the mother of one of them, Keith Bennett, wrote to Hindley in 1986 imploring her help. Hindley, who had not been in contact with Brady for years, confessed to other murders and agreed to help police search the Moors for bodies. (Bennett’s body was never found, but another victim’s, Pauline Reade’s, was.)

It was Brady who did the actual killing, but it’s Hindley who’s been more reviled. I’ve neither the wish nor the stomach to make Myra Hindley into a feminist victim, but there’s no escaping that part of the hatred towards her stems from the way her role is a nightmarish perversion of the nurturing one women are expected to play. Hindley has been fixed forever into nightmares of Britons not just for what she did but, to judge from the way Alma reacts to it, for the mugshot that forever defined her for the British public. In it, her “meaty-mouthed” lips are screwed up in a defiant scowl, and her deep-set, black-rimmed eyes stare out resentfully from under a bouffant of bleached-blond hair with visible black roots.

Part of what causes Alma to withhold something of herself from the spotlight, what plants in her mind the idea of withdrawing from it well before her fame is ended, is a grotesque episode early on in the book when, at a party to celebrate the end of a season of summer vaudeville, she sees two thugs disfigure a young female impersonator lip-synching to a Doris Day number. When Alma sees that mugshot of Hindley, she sees the apotheosis of the “dark, devious energies” that, ever since witnessing that attack, she is certain lurks in the bland and ordinary.

Burn’s novel isn’t the belittling, superior treatment Hindley and Brady received in the only major book about the Moors murders, the playwright Emlyn Williams’s 1968 Beyond Belief. The main motivation of Williams’s book is a rather bald attempt to cash in on some of glory and fortune bestowed on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Its (specifically British) message amounts to, “If these dreadful classes and their dreadful culture are going to be allowed to run rampant, well, really what can we expect?” Unable to explain Hindley and Brady (and who, outside of the cheapest pop psychologist, would try to?), Williams pins the blame on the pulpy movie thrillers Brady was drawn to, his taste for De Sade, the sixties glamorization of the secret agent through The Avengers and the Bond movies. Attempting to calm a nation that had been thoroughly rattled by the lover-killers, Williams insists that they’re not worth anyone’s fear, not even worth their own infamy. He doesn’t give them their due. By belittling them, he belittles their crimes; he won’t admit that there’s a very good reason why Hindley and Brady should disturb your sleep.

Burn is much cannier, and much more unsettling. He knows there’s nothing that will explain Myra Hindley to us, and he knows that, in pop culture, serial killers are celebrities. What’s really bothersome here is the suggestion that our inability to comprehend Hindley parallels our inability to really know any famous person. Just as we create identities for our idols that turn them into fantasy friends and lovers, we also create identities that help us explain the incomprehensible. That newspaper headline—_{SHAMEFUL, CYNICAL, AND CRUEL}—isn’t wrong, but where does it leave us? How does it help us understand a woman who, after participating in the atrocities she did, can joke, in a prison letter to her lover, “I didn’t kill any Moors, did you?”

And Burn realizes that the media, with its seemingly endless capacity for reproducing and spreading images that drain events of their meaning and freeze people into one set identity, play into that unfathomability. Alma tries to connect the famous mugshot of Hindley (which she likens to an identikit sketch) with the person she sees on the news—a thin, black-hooded figure, the face under the hood hidden from the camera, walking the Moors surrounded by policemen, watched by sharpshooters—just as she tries to connect herself to her former media incarnation, which has survived independently of her.

Slogging through the preserved detritus of her own fame, Alma finds that “Alma Cogan” has lived on in publicity photos, on videotape, on digitally reprocessed CD versions of songs she assumed were as disposable as the vinyl they were pressed on, in gowns packed away in theatrical-costume museums, and in Peter Blake’s portrait of her in the Tate Gallery. It’s the mass media version of immortality. “Alma Cogan” becomes another of the ghosts haunting the novel, and Alma is unnerved that this identity—which, for her, is dead—is suspended in time, preserved just as the bodies on the Moors were thought to have been partially preserved in the peat of the soil, or the notes of music that, scientists tell us, continue to reverberate through the cosmos long after they’ve been played. It’s as if, viewing all these accumulated and catalogued artifacts, Alma herself begins to feel a little unreal.

Burn realizes that the pervasiveness of pop culture creates new meanings: “Be My Baby” becomes the soundtrack for that lovely schoolgirl crossing the street; Brady buys Hindley a new 45 record while preparing for each murder. And Burn matches any of the pop disjunctions thought up by David Lynch or Dennis Potter. In one scene, Alma, in her solitary happy hour, listening to “The Way You Look Tonight” on the phonograph, is set off on a reverie by one of the storeroom’s items, a child’s skateboard with the name Lesley taped to it. As she thinks of Lesley Ann Downey, the lyrics to the Dorothy Fields-Jerome Kern chestnut mingle in her head with imagined quotes from the parents of the murdered children, turning a song about the glow of remembered romance into a harbinger of an unassuageable pain:

Someday, when I’m awfully low, when the world is cold

“We’re going to leave her room just as it was the morning she walked out of her...”

“He just ran round to the shop to buy crisps and pop...”

I will feel a glow just thinking of you

“It wasn’t late. She just went round to her nan’s to show her new watch....

“Please. Please. Just give us something to let us know she’s safe....”

Burn tops that scene in the novel’s climax. As Alma pursues the collected and catalogued memorabilia of her career, as a way of finally shutting the door on the past, she ventures north to Manchester, to meet Francis McLaren, one of the odd “authorities” pop culture gives rise to, someone who combines the obsessiveness of the fan, the uncritical compulsiveness of the collector, and the persnickety precision of the old-maid librarian. McLaren has devoted most of his life to collecting all manner of mementos relating to the career of Alma Cogan: photos, tapes, videos, concert programs, even costumes. He’s gone as far as any nonpsychotic can go in divorcing his idol from a real person. During the evening Alma spends in his home leafing through scrapbooks and watching videos, he keeps dropping knowing bits of information. It never seems to occur to him that the career he’s describing belonged to the person sitting in his living room (he keeps referring to the woman on the videos and cassettes in the third person). When McLaren goes to bed, leaving Alma alone to sift through his collection, she discovers the extent of his obsession.

In a box marked 1964, Alma finds a tape dated December 26, Boxing Day, which contains a recording of a Radio Luxembourg holiday broadcast on which she sings three numbers. She notices something odd about the tape immediately. She says it “resonates with the acoustics of a particular room at a particular...time.” At first she thinks it’s another of the taped obscene fantasies that have been sent to her by men and women over the years (she’s already found some of those in McLaren’s collection). It’s worse. As Alma sings her final number, “The Little Drummer Boy,” that “particular room” on the tape reveals itself to be Hindley and Brady’s sitting room as they prepare to kill Lesley Ann Downey.

It’s as shocking a moment as any in modern fiction that I’ve come across, and all the more so for the inescapable logic of it, for the way Burn sees the full potential of pop culture to sharpen and reduce emotion and events in one blinding flash. (There’s nothing sensationalistic about the scene. The dialogue he transcribes is suggestive, not graphic, and Burn has already prepared us by describing, straightforwardly and dispassionately, Downey’s murder.) When Alma confronts McLaren, he replies, “I don’t see what the fuss is about...A few years ago anybody could buy a copy in Manchester. If you went to the right pub. You could buy pictures of the girl if you knew the right channels...My only interest was you.” He’s oblivious to the horror on the tape, interested only, as he tells her, in “the complete unavailability of those tracks anywhere else. The rarity value. It was a big job getting it up to even the quality it is now.” Now—when television infotainment shows broadcast tapes of frantic 911 calls in prime time; when Charles Manson’s album is available on CD in any alternative-rock record store; when you can leaf through books and find morgue photos of Marilyn Monroe; when, it’s said, you can get a video of Elvis’s autopsy—that scene is chillingly plausible. Imagine what a collector would pay for the copy of Double Fantasy that Lennon autographed for Chapman a few hours before Chapman murdered him.

The horror of Alma’s discovery isn’t just McLaren’s coveting such a grisly artifact, but the obscene juxtaposition of “The Little Drummer Boy” with the murder of Lesley Ann Downey. We’re asked to imagine, as Alma does, what a mockery her rendition of that treacly heartwarmer must have sounded to the terrified little girl staring at Ian Brady (“Then he smiled at me....”). Alma’s final act is a way of making amends, a symbolic burying of her past, and an offering to assuage a cruelty for which she bears no blame.

Burn clearly loves pop culture, but he doesn’t fetishize it. He doesn’t shy away from its dark recesses. Reading Alma is a terrifying, exhilarating experience, the way watching The Night of the Hunter or Blue Velvet is. Suddenly, secret worlds seem to be exposing themselves. And Burn doesn’t use pop culture’s sometimes insidious banality and the “vile craziness” Alma fears as an argument for withdrawing from the world, but for living in it—with awareness and decency. His novel suggests a collaboration between the novelist Colin Macinnes’s celebration of city rhythms in Absolute Beginners, and the painter Francis Bacon’s unsparing, compassionate look into the abyss. As you read Alma, you begin to see where pop culture crosses over into private obsession, where fantasy crosses over into isolation and pathology, where nostalgia creeps toward morbidity, and suddenly you’re a step closer to the unfathomable, because you’ve heard the alien echoes of familiar territory.