Product Description

Breathtaking in its scope and originality, "Seven Basic Plots" examines the basis of story telling in literature, film, and libretto. No one will ever see stories in the same way again. This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years. This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4448 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Review
"This book...has mind-expanding properties. Not only for anyone interested in literature, but also for those fascinated by wider questions of how human beings organise their societies and explain the outside world to their inmost selves, it is fascinating. Katherine Sale, FT Christopher Booker's mammoth account of plot types, archetypes, their role in literary history and where Western culture has gone horribly wrong. Times Literary Supplement His prose is a model of clarity, and his lively enthusiasm for fictions of every description is infectious... The Seven Basic Plots is nevertheless one of the most diverting works on storytelling I've ever encountered. Dennis Dutton, The Washington Post This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book. Fay Weldon, novelist An enormous piece of work, not really one book at all but at least three... nothing less than the story of all stories. Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye This is literally an incomparable book, because there is nothing to compare it with. It goes to the heart of man's cultural evolution through the stories we have told since storytelling began. It illuminates our nature, our beliefs and our collective emotions by shining a bright light on them from a completely new angle. Original, profound, fascinating - and on top of it all, a really good read. Sir Antony Jay, co-author of Yes, Minister I have been quite bowled over by Christopher Booker's new book. It is so well planned with an excellent beginning and the contrasts and comparisons throughout are highly entertaining as well as informative and most original - and always extremely readable. John Bayley This is a truly important book, an accolade often bestowed and rarely deserved in our modern age. Dame Beryl Bainbridge"

From the Publisher
Breathtaking in its scope and originality, Seven Basic Plots examines the basis of story- telling in literature, film, and libretto. No one will ever read a novel in the same way again.
Comparable to Harold Bloom's masterpiece The Canon.
The fruit of a lifetime's research and fifteen years in the writing.
Christopher Booker is an author with a high profile with a weekly column in The Sunday Telegraph. This is his most important book to date.
Review coverage and fierce argument and debate about this book are guaranteed.

About the Author
Christopher Booker was one of the founders of Private Eye. He writes a weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph. He has published many books including The Neophiliacs, Castle of Lies and The Great Deception. He still writes for Private Eye.

Customer Reviews

A Masterpiece
Excellent and profound book - a must read for readers interested to gain a deep(er) understanding of the way literature relates to life!

A quarter good, the rest a mess
Booker kept reminding me, weirdly, as I went through this, of Slavoj Zizek. Just as Zizek, the Lacanian Marxist, trawls through films only to repeatedly discover, each time like a revelation, that we are in the realms of ideology and the 'obscene dominant superego injunction to enjoy', Booker, the Jungian right winger, reads every story as a valediction of Jung's archetypes and hetero family values and a denigration of the ego. Booker's 'ego' and Zizek's 'superego' function in similar ways, roughly speaking, as the psychic embodiment and inspiration for evil, particularly selfishness and it's these devices that bring these apparently antithetical figures into similar territory. Zizek's delineation of the latter's functioning is considerably more complex and, ultimately, useful, but both ego and superego are drivers of the modern decadence perceived and unashamedly pilloried by both authors. At times their targets can seem remarkably similar, e.g. the hippy movement. Reading Booker's characterisation of this as a 'rigidly conformist' 'group fantasy' built on denigration of others felt rather like pulling a poisoned dart out of myself. (Booker goes on to describe Solzhenitsyn's own vilification of western decadence in some detail. Zizek might balk at the comparison, but, as another former Soviet Bloc dissident, feted by a West he continues to phlegmatically critique for its moral bankruptcy, he can seem like a successor of sorts.) It's fun to read contemporary moralists because they provide such a corrective to the sixties' painfully, corruptedly foggy-headed legacy of la la let it all hang out, but where Zizek is rapier-like, challenging, funny and full of surprises, Booker does ultimately just come across as a crank.

In the first section, where he lays out the seven plots of the title, I was with him all the way. Reductive? Incomplete? I can do without the pedantry at this point. You don't have to buy the system wholesale to see that Booker is here, fascinatingly, identifying patterns in storytelling that are extraordinarily consistent over thousands of years. The point is, he's giving you something you can use. In an almost Euclidian way I found myself involuntarily playing with his basic storytelling riffs to come up, giddily, with an ever more complex world of variety. I felt so inspired I thought I was going to pop. It's this section and this section alone that earns the book its stars here.

How could it have got so tangled after this? The second section is eye-wateringly repetitive, telling us in several barely varying passages how stories are peopled by a selection of archetypal figures who's function is to bring us and the hero out of darkness and into light. The same principles come up over and over again: the ultimate aim of 'seeing whole', the need to go down into darkness in order to attain light, the importance of uniting the mature masculine with the mature feminine, the need to go 'below the line' to the realms of the marginalised and oppressed in order to expose the corruption of the 'above the line' world of authority. This is not complex stuff and even if it was, it would only need to be explained well once.

Where was the editor? Asleep it seems, or overawed, because, as the book goes on, it's not just the repetition that becomes wearing, it's the increasing instance of missed out words. There's at least one indefensibly verbless sentence and also a bizarrely erroneous description of the story of Rebel Without A Cause that someone really should have spotted: Dean as a speed-obsessed hero ends by wiping himself out in a car accident. Has Booker even seen this film?

Oh well, even a fully awake editor couldn't have done much to right the book's more serious philosophical flaws, which are, I'm afraid, fatal. Booker's an old-fashioned Tory paternalist and he uses his Jungian system to inform us, in no uncertain terms and with only slightly more intellectual rigour than your average reactionary, that most of nineteenth and twentieth century literature (as well as a great deal of the music and art of this period) is immoral and therefore bad for us. There's a certain amount of shooting the messenger in all this. Booker often doesn't seem to know who his friends are. He off-handedly describes Breathless as one of various new wave films that take us through a series of largely senseless events only to end with an act of shocking violence - completely missing the fact that the film almost precisely conforms to his own description of tragic structure: anticipation followed by decisive immoral act followed by dream stage (it's all going to be OK) followed by frustration, then nightmare stage, brief renewal of hope, then destruction.

Booker can't seem to conceive of the idea that films like Breathless, Bonny and Clyde and A Clockwork Orange might be anything other than unconscious critiques of the sixties licentiousness he disapproves of. The last, in particular, he criticises on the grounds that it leaves its hero unpunished, contains untrustworthy authority figures who have pornographic sculptures in their homes and, most egregiously of all, shows its antihero being inspired to commit acts of violence by listening to Beethoven. Booker's now childlike mind seems incapable of grasping the three key, interrelated points here a) that Alex ends up unpunished precisely because the authority figures are, themselves, hypocritical and deficient in morality - to whit the critique is deliberate, b) the pornographic sculptures are there on purpose as a sign of precisely the kind of moral and aesthetic bankruptcy that Booker bemoans and c) the Nazis listened to Beethoven too; and it's not surprising Booker misses this last, because it's the dangling thread that almost unravels the whole second half of Booker's epic paean to morally uplifting art.

Except there's worse: he lets his manichean good v. bad moralism completely blind him to more nuanced pleasures, both humane and aesthetic, of Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. His 'critiques' of these books, centring on Proust's 'immaturity' and Joyce's depictions of masturbation, also 'immature', read like justifications that could have been used at Nazi literary auto da fes. Everywhere, the sound of galloping right wing hobby horses becomes deafening, even as Booker tries to slip in some of his more beyond the pale prejudices by insinuation: William Burroughs' books are mischaracterised as being designed so you can read the sentences in any order (bad) as, in the same sentence, we learn that Burroughs was a drug addict (bad) and homosexual (hmm...bad?).

Oh well. All we can do is try to avoid the same prejudiced reasoning ourselves. So I won't say Booker's argument is bad just because he uses it to be homophobic and anti-feminist, which is just my subjective view. I'll say it's bad because it's hopelessly muddled, which I'm pretty sure is inarguable. One of Booker's main themes, virtually the whole theme of the last section, is the idea that a great deal of immoral behaviour can be shown to be a result of 'ego-Self confusion'. The 'Self' (always capped) in Booker's schema is the light, balanced consciousness that 'sees whole'. It is symbolised in stories by the attainment of harmonious unities, particularly marriage, but it is really only a psychical phenomena, attained by bringing the archetypes in one's own mind into light and balance. Booker cautions, when these archetypes are projected outwards into material goals, we become alienated from the Self and act instead in the service of the ego.

It's an important distinction and one I find I have some sympathy with. I've been putting to good use lately: that shirt I wanted? It's actually just a representation of a certain feeling of confidence I lack. My need for a girlfriend? My need to get in touch with my anima. It's genuinely helping.

It also helps me read Booker, because it means that when he's talking about the need to go below the line socially or reconnect with nature, he's only talking about the mind. Like, he's definitely not defending Communism, which he says is a confusion of ego and Self objectives and, after all, didn't turn out too well - oh, except that its own 'below the line' darkness created heroes like Solzhenitsyn, who is real and not an archetype in your mind or mine. Nor, somewhat surprisingly, is he defending environmentalism, which he wants to tell us is also just another cultlike collective fantasy characterised by nothing but sentimentalism; he dislikes a lot of the real things that environmentalists dislike, but only, apparently, because of the effects on our minds. On the other hand, he does want to tell us that Churchill, the real life flesh and blood Churchill, was good because he was a heroic light father figure archetype, and that all that pitching in during the Blitz was good collective behaviour, even though that was real too. He also likes Thatcher even though she was a woman embodying the same heroic light masculine qualities as Churchill and doesn't like Ripley in Alien because she's a woman embodying heroic light masculine qualities. Oh brother. There's no consistency here. None. And the reason? Well, it's partly that Booker can't stick to his own strictly mental rule and partly that the whole Archetypes idea (as presented here), which Booker describes as being on a par with Einstein's theory of relativity and Crick and Watson's discovery of the double helix, is so nebulous that it allows him to defend and attack whatever he likes with a spuriously scientific underpinning.

In short, in an irony so dumb and obvious you think surely he would have noticed it, Booker's extended warning against the ego is seriously undermined by his own ego.

Are seven plots enough?
There are only three kinds of journey: the ones when you start out, and finish somewhere else; the ones where you finish back where you started; and the journeys where you go from one place, and then go on to another. With that you have what you need to understand the essence of travel. Or perhaps you don't, because you just might think that there are some other important issues to bear in mind - like where you're going, what you see or what you do on the way. That's the central problem with Christopher Booker's work. Booker does say something worthwhile about many stories, and he does point to things that many stories have in common: but it's a moot point whether what he tells us about stories is what actually matters about them.

If we take Booker's premise at face value, it's worth asking: in what sense are these seven plots basic? His classification and treatment is heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, mixed with Aristotle. There's a substantial overlap between the heroic stories - especially "the quest" and "voyage and return" - while others, like "comedy" or "tragedy", serve as elaborate classifications rather than core plots. Reading the outlines, however, I found myself irresistibly thinking of other basic plots with just as strong claims for inclusion. For example, "The sorcerer's apprentice" is the root of a whole class of literature, both tragic (it's the staple of horror stories) and comic (including any farce where events spiral out of control). "Solomon Grundy" (born on Monday, christened on Tuesday, on and so on) may not be much of a plot, but it's the basis of lots of po-faced Victorian and Edwardian novels. "The trickster" is there in Anansi stories, the Bible or The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. "The defiant truth-sayer" is the core of An Enemy of the People, Jaws, Galileo, Butler's Lives of the Saints, perhaps even - if you accept the inversion - Paradise Lost. "The thwarted lovers" are the staple of books like I Promessi Sposi, The Duchess of Malfi and Casablanca. "The merry-go-round" - the patterned repetition and recurrence of events, people and situations - is the basic plot device behind picaresque books like Candide or A Clockwork Orange, and sequential plots like La Ronde or Bunuel's Fantome de Liberte. The list could go on, and on, and on. The Seven Basic Plots is, at one and the same time, engaging, infuriating, insightful and portentous. Unfortunately, the tools it offers are rather too blunt to do the work it sets out to do.