Alma CL

In a thrilling tour de force, British wrier Burn ( Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son ) has created a first novel at once accessible and complex, one that resonates with an enduring mystery of our time: how fame both obscures and defines an individual. Burn reimagines real-life British '50s pop singer Alma Cogan, who died in 1966. However, he plunks Alma into the '80s and allows her to disinter her past--``the tangible fragments of a certain kind of lived life.'' Gradually Burn conflates her story with that of the contemporaneous reopening of the 20-year-old case of notorious mass murderer Myra Hindley; in doing so he posits a new theory of hagiography while grounding his work in astoundingly observant storytelling. The writing could almost be poetry: Burn's Alma is always seeing beyond the surfaces of things--railway towns, neighbors' poses, backstage, memory itself--to the itchy disquiet at the base of them. The author incarnates the sort of luridly colored photos that decorated record albums of the era and then, with painful precision, peels off the illusion. Throughout, Alma seems as distant from her own life as we are from lives like hers, no doubt Burn's point. Is his tale all fabrication? Or does random violence lurk beneath all pretty desire? Alma received the 1991 Whitbread Prize. (Sept.)