The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (Hardcover)

I won't attempt to sum up such a magnum opus but instead, here are some of my personal observations of the book - what made it special for me;

1. It is an easy read -- always interesting and well constructed, refreshing and thought provoking.

2. It is standalone -- by which I mean you are not expected to be familiar with the great works of literature or jungian psychology; in some ways this book is the ultimate "bluffers guide" to all of literature -- each work is surmised and explained in enough detail to justify an argument or assertion.

3. It is visionary -- this book paints the biggest of the big pictures; what emerges spans all of the arts and humanities bringing a truly visionary perspective that is at time challenging and always thought provoking; what stories reveal about who we are? why are we like we are?

4. It is inspirational -- how many readers will close the book desperate to unleash that "novel within them" given the secrets to developing plots that "hit the mark" (smile).

After reading it I can fully understand why it has taken 35 years to produce, having spent 7 days reading it I feel I have cheated the author. I'm sure I'll be back to it again as some of the subtleties reveal themselves, and to challenge the arguments themselves with the armoury he provides.

On the negative side, I found it meandered a little here and there and felt a little repetetive at times, but this is to be expected when you write, on average one chapter a year!!!! Some of the typos are surprising and it must contain some of the longest footnotes in all of publishing!

Best non-fiction book I have ever read.

Both Jungian psychoanalysis and moral objectivity are taken as read by Christopher Booker and as such he spends no time justifying them (perhaps understandably - the arguments for and against each would fill this book many times over). Nonetheless, in my view, he's simply wrong about both of them, and it blows a Big Hole in his Big Idea.

Booker's Big Idea is this: when you boil them down, there are only seven archetypal stories in all of literature, and further that if you boil those archetypes down, they are in many ways the same story viewed from different perspectives. This is perhaps intuitively understandable: in the broadest sense all stories are a variation of "there once was a problem, and it got resolved" - but the kicker is this: Booker asserts that any story which fails to follow his prescription is - objectively - flawed. Now that sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't it.

The first observation to make is that this significantly undermines his claim to have found a unifying theory: Suddenly, it's not all literature that follows the archetype, but all *good* literature. As a moral objectivist, that doesn't seem to Booker like much of a concession, but from any other perspective it is: what Booker is saying is that all literature *which he likes* meets one of the seven archetypes. What seemed to be a bold assertion about the nature of literature is instead a simple indictment of Booker's appreciation of it.

That seems more plausible, anyway: the point and content of a story, you would think, cannot be straight-jacketed in this way. The fact that popular stories tend to have similarities speaks to our cultural heritage, the common dilemmas of life and death we share, and perhaps to our lack of imagination, not to some cosmic rule of fiction. This has been borne out in more "enlightened" times (literally - since the enlightenment), as Booker notes to his dismay that these similarities have tended to fade. But even without that modern interference, Booker notes that the seven archetypes tend to fragment under the weight of closer analysis - there are "dark inversions" of each, and inversions of various characters. So, the seven become fourteen or more.

The second problem is that, as mentioned, the last couple of centuries have seen stories fail more and more to keep to the archetypes. Booker blames this on romanticism, and is required by his theory to claim that these divergent stories are intrinsically flawed. That might not be a problem were these flawed stories not to include almost all the classics of modern literature, except perhaps Lord of the Rings and the Narnia chronicles (both of which, quelle surprise, have a fundamentally Christian, and therefore morally objectivist, subtext).

So, you can write off Melville, Nabokov, Balzac, Lawrence, Stoker and Shelley, or write off Booker's theory.

For me, it isn't a difficult choice.

Olly Buxton