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| The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories | 
 enlarge | Author: Christopher Booker
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Category: Book
List Price: £15.99
Buy New: £10.23
You Save: £5.76 (36%)
New (36) from £9.81
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 5070
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 736
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.9
ISBN: 0826480373
Dewey Decimal Number: 809.924
EAN: 9780826480378
ASIN: 0826480373
Publication Date: November 10, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Are seven plots enough? September 26, 2008
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 August 10, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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? August 3, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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 May 6, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
reudctionist and misguided May 3, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book is incredibly reductionist, it is also incredibly misguided. At the beginning of the book, Booker states that there are essentially two types of story 'happy' and 'sad'. This is his first, and perhaps most serious of errors. There are in fact three story types, 'happy', 'sad' and the most complex of these 'ironic'. In the 'ironic' ending, the story is both happy and sad depending on the view point. The strongest example of this type of story is the 'secrifice', for example 'Casablance' where the protagonist gives up there own happiness for the greater good. The exemption of this type of story leaves booker's central catagerisation of story (I'm only 96pp in so far)wrong. In the each of the seven plot types, he only uses elements of each story that fit his 'archtype' and his reliance on using the same stories as examples in multiple chapters unermines his argument. He also makes erronious assumptions that demonstrate his own essential mis-understanding, nowhere is this more clear than when he deals with 'The Third Man', a story he admits at the start he 'initially' had trouble categorising. He classes it a 'voyage and return' story because at the end 'although we don't see it, we assume life returns to normal', this is completely the opposite of what Greene was trying to say! The clever screenplay is actually about the fracturisation of humanity coming from the shadow of the second world war. THe central point is that life wil NEVER be the same again, and he can never return to the world he has known. We are left with Holly Martins cut of from humanity, on a distant island, unable to attach himself to the love of his life who he wishes to touch so much. Her walking past at the end and the death of Harry Lime demonstrates the death and dislocation of everything Holly has ever known. Booker misses this as he misses so much else. His thoughts are not even remotely original. The 'perilous escape from death' and the 'constriction and relax' are essential to story, because it has to have conflict by its nature and this has to grow up to the point of 'crisis' because you cannot go from a massive challenge to a minor one, it fails to retain interest.
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