The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
by Christopher Booker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Christopher BookerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01
ISBN: 0826480373
Number of pages: 736
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group
Book Reviews of The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
Book Review: Overwhelmed by the Ego
Summary: 3 Stars
This review is just to cover several points that Olly Buxton's and Allen Smalling's excellent review did not stress. While I could shrug off the author's dismissal of books that didn't fit into the archetypes (a criticism of Buxton and Smalling), there are some other serious problems with this book.
1. As Allen Smalling suggests, a la Orwell's observation that inside every fat man is a thin man trying to get out, there is a provocative, insightful much smaller book hidden away in this bloated beast. But it is buried under endless plot summaries. The top of every page in the first half could have a "***spoiler warning***" on it. If you've already read the book/play/movie, the plot summary is likely to be boring. If you think you might want to read the book some day, it could ruin it. That means that the only summaries that are worth reading are for books that you know you have no desire or time to read. And quite frankly, anyone reading a 700+ page book on plot probably has already read most of these books and seen the same movies and plays. And the redundancy! The author shows how a story fits into one plot pattern and then summarizes again to show how it fits into another. He does this over and over again. In terms of the author's language, his Ego has become out of balance.
There are some great moments in this book, like showing how Big Bang theory fits into the archetypes and the comparison of the Book of Job and _Nineteen Eighty-four_. I'm also sure that I'll use some of Booker's terminology like `going below the line'. And no matter how irascible his style of criticism is, it does get at why certain works feel ultimately unsatisfying and why others are so enduring and innovative. But Smalling hit it on the head when he called this book `inefficient'. This is a book to be skimmed.
2. This book is a dinosaur. As I was finishing it up, I thought, `Books like this started dying out -- or rather got ridden out on a rail -- in the 1970s.' Then sure enough, the author's note at the end said it took 34 years to write. The reason people don't write books like this anymore is that you get slaughtered by the charge of ethnocentrism. Except for a few moments when it says it is about Western story-telling over the last 200 years, the book purports to be about all story-telling. All. It, however, commits a huge fallacy: it looks almost solely at Western stories and then tries to root them in biology -- as if the West exhausts the range of human experience. Similarly, the author's notions of gender do not appear to have changed since the 1950s and he talks blithely about `light' versus `dark' without any recognition whatsoever of the pervasiveness of racism to world history for the last five hundred years. (Towards the end he does briefly talk about feminism and that only reinforces the sense that he still refuses to accept that the Sixties happened.)
Before I read this book, I naively believed that there were a small and set number of plots. Contra its intentions, the book convinced me that that is not true. It gives so much evidence of constant human ingenuity to create more plots. So the would-be writers who give this four or five stars, as a reader, I hope instead of trying to use the plots described in this book as templates, you use it as a catalog of cliches and try to push beyond them.
Summary of The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
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.Literary Theory Books
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