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: #2952 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"

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

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.

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.