BOOK REVIEW : When Stardom Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be : ALMA, <i> by Gordon Burn</i> . Houghton Mifflin, $19.95; 210 pages

Fame is the spur, Milton wrote, and now we pretty much have celebrity; not a spur but a maw. Fame was wrung out of the public by the hero, with backstage arranging from poets and balladeers. Celebrity is wrung out of the hero by the public, with backstage arranging from promoters and publicists.

It is no new notion that sacred cows have it rough in steak country; that our times arrange to have our sacred cows and eat them too, though it may take a little longer than Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes. But Gordon Burn, a British writer on pop culture, has found a fierce yet exhilarating way to write it.

“Alma” is a fictional monologue by Alma Cogan, who was Britain’s biggest female pop star in the ‘50s; a kind of English Patti Page or Doris Day. Bouffant hairdo, New Look full skirts, red-red lipstick, and a sprightly, chins-up way with chirpy love songs. The Beatles and the ‘60s wiped the style out, though it took seven or eight years to disappear.

In the dismally straitened postwar years, the British public needed pretty colors and “The Girl With a Chuckle in Her Throat,” as Alma was called. But the times were not as innocent as its songs. In the very first page, Alma tells of her horror of being crowded by her fans.

It wasn’t just the damp mustiness of clothes and armpits when coal and hot water were scarcities. It was the humming tension underneath the drab jackets and overcoats; the sense of an animal about to spring in the brush of a shoulder or a back. It was the voracity of the mass audience. We hear about the violence in punk rock, heavy metal, rap; perhaps there was more--since it was pent up--in the crowds that came to hear the chirpers.

Burn is after the brutal undercurrents of a bland mass-manipulated society. He is not writing an essay, though, but a fiction; and what is remarkable about his Alma is the voice he invents for this one-time star, who retired before she slipped too far.

There is no quiet in her active, searching mind, though. She meditates and remembers. She is trying to capture what happened to her and what happened to postwar Britain. She is psyching out the deeper violence of celebrity, and through it, a broader darkness.

“Alma” has the apparently random form of a montage of vignettes about the past and scenes from her present-day life. We hear about Alma’s concerts, about her hobnobbing with other celebrities, about her unstoppable show-biz mother and the noisy spaghetti dinners she used to give.

The past had its terrible moments. The lines were fuzzing between society, show business and elements in the criminal milieu. An image that recurs throughout is Alma’s memory of seeing two mobsters literally rip apart the mouth of a young singer who had crossed them. The image blurs into the scarlet mouths she and the other artistes of the time would paint on.

Darkness is never far away, even in the present. In her quiet seaside town, somebody smears excrement on her windows. And if she thought to retire from the voracity of her fans, she finds that it continues in a different guise. The nostalgia boom has hit; she gets calls from promoters, packagers and TV shows. The past is a commodity.

The book’s last third is a strange and increasingly spellbinding journey she takes to try to pull together the threads of past and present.

She gets on the trail of a man who has been steadily collecting her memorabilia. She visits him in a town in the north and finds herself in a dingy house that is a museum of herself. Its “curator” is a government clerk who is surrounded by costumes, programs, clippings, photographs, records and broadcast tapes. He serves Spam sandwiches and tea and talks of “my love for her.” Sitting across from this vampire-like slug, she is simply another visitor; in his cartons, folders and closets he possesses the real one.

From time to time, as Alma speaks of her memories and of her present search, she mentions newspaper and television accounts of a current news event. Myra Hindley, one of two perpetrators of a series of child murders 20 years before, has confessed; and she is shown helping the police trace the bodies on the moors above Manchester.

So we have Alma, two decades after her celebrity, and Hindley, two decades after hers. The spirited, inquiring woman whom we become very fond of--a splendid achievement in a book that is so chillingly thematic--and the monster we cannot even imagine, converge. And Burn seals the convergence with a quiet finale.