Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3305 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

Anthony Stevens
"I am overwhelmed by the immensity of [this] intellectual, literary, cultural and psychological achievement."

Synopsis
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.

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.

Customer Reviews

Why we should sometimes keep our own stories to ourselves
This is a book of grand pretensions and equally grand narratives. It brings forth equally grand expletives. It is written as if the theoretical problems with the idea of the auteur, grand narratives, identity, otherness, the ego, Freud and Jung had never existed. It has a latent Christianity (at least a latent religiosity), homophobia and puritanism which, in this post-modern, liberal age seems disturbingly Victorian, transparently prejudiced and disqualifies the author from making the kinds of universalising claims that he makes about certain texts. Don't we live in an age of pluralism where simple binary distinctions such as 'light and dark' don't necessarily apply to people, stories, places and events? Methodologically, his arguments are crippled by such reductio ad absurdums and such abstractions render the meta-analysis of plot to his narrow Jungian taxonomy of archetypes failures of classification and analysis.

His attacks on Proust's homosexuality, masculinity and introspectiveness and on masturbation in Joyce are just two clear examples where this prejudice (which will be clear to most humanities undergraduates) is evident and which will entirely discredit the author in academic circles. These are just the tip of the critical ice-berg. Stylistically, the book is repetitive and clearly needs editing. In terms of the endless plot summaries, if you want all the best stories in the world that you have never read/seen to be spoilt then this is the book for you. If you have read/seen lots of them and want to see them butchered and spoon-fed back to you by your provincial, fascist school-master then read on. It feels as if the major achievements of psychology, philosophy, literature, critical theory, cultural studies and most of the humanities have passed Mr Booker by.

While the idea, as a question, problem and research area of this book is undoubtedly an interesting one and Mr Booker should be patted on the head for reading a lot of stories and writing 'high-concept' style Hollywood veneers of these, the other substantial texts on this subject are ignored. He also relies exclusively, bar one or two examples on Western authors and stories. Africa, Oceania, the early Americas, most of Asia, Scandinavia and South America are largely unrepresented as are plots in other forms of culture which are not books such as art, popular culture, design and ritual. So with such a narrow sample of stories from such a narrow range of possible narrative forms and media, without a context, precedents, method or a methodology, critical theory or some kind of idea of how he might validate or compare his ideas about plots with alternate or different and opposing ideas and arguments, the book becomes a kind of solipsistic, egotistical evidence against itself. More importantly, he fails to identify that some of the reasons why people tell stories are to try to tell new stories (they want the 8th and nth basic plots), because their own stories are untold, to correct false tellings of their stories and so that they don't have to hear other people's stories continuously retold to them or to counter their own stories being falsified, re-interpreted, butchered and force-fed back to them in seven pre-packaged portions.

Beckett, Chekhov and Orwell 'Missing the Mark'? Are you mugging me off?
I may have missed the subtleties of Mr Booker's arguments but when moving onto the section about stories that don't work and having the fellas in the title of my review mentioned I was absolutely gob smacked. He describes 1984 and Waiting for Godot amongst many others as 'flawed' and not working as stories. I presume Virginia Woolf and James Joyce would be thrown into Mr Booker's rejected pile too? Delving through the early chapters of this immense book I knew there was a reason I felt uneasy about his fundamentalist theory on stories but thankfully he provided the later chapters in order to reassure me I hadn't gone stark staring bonkers. This would be very useful if you want to write a lovely animated film for Disney or 'do a Lucas' and bodge up another Indiana Jones or Star Wars film to pay for the next four generations of your family to heat their swimming pools but in terms of an intellectual insight into stories and how they operate it shares a similar vibe with an Abu Hamza sermon in the middle of a rainy Finsbury Park road. If i've missed the point I humbly apologise but human psychology, story-telling and philosophy that fit into a comfortable 7 point plan went out of fashion with Stalin and Hitler, I hope.

Flawed but important
Reading other reviews there seems to be quite a heated difference of opinion on this book so I will endeavour to give a middle view. A lot of people are saying it's important and I absolutely agree. Others point out numerous flaws and they are true too. In short the idea behind the book is a definitely 5 stars. The execution is at best 3.

What is most odd is the fact that a book called "the seven basic plots" is about 500 pages long. The font is pretty small too meaning this is a very long way round explaining a perfectly reasonable and highly enlightening idea.

What Mr Booker points out is that the vast majority (if not all) stories can be neatly summarised into definite areas- the quest, the comedy etc. He then goes on to show how the basic frame work of Gilgamesh works in exactly the same way as something more modern like Dr No. He also does a very good job of explaining that these basic ideas are so ingrained in us that we tend to not like stories that break the rules of each type of plot.

I can understand why this may annoy some in the literary circles but I absolutely think his points are valid. However he uses too many examples- there are pages of them when the point has already been made and the second half of the book goes off on all sorts of tangents many of which are unnecessary.

Ultimately I think an abridged version of this book would be a vast improvement getting to the point quicker, summarising the ideas more succinctly and then not meandering around other ideas for 250 pages.