Customer Reviews
A Masterpiece - By: Someone from London, 02 Dec 2008 
Excellent & profound book - a must read for readers interested to gain a deep(er) understanding of the way literature relates to life!
A quarter good, the rest a mess - By: digit, 18 Oct 2008 
Booker kept reminding me, weirdly, as I went through this, of Slavoj Zizek. Just as Zizek, the Lacanian Marxist, trawls through films only to repeatedly discover, each time like a revelation, that we arein the realms of ideology & the 'obscene dominant superego injunction to enjoy', Booker, the Jungian right winger, reads every story as a valediction of Jung's archetypes & hetero family values & a denigration of the ego. Booker's 'ego' & Zizek's 'superego' functionin similar ways, roughly speaking, as the psychic embodiment & inspiration for evil, particularly selfishness & it's these devices that bring these apparently antithetical figures into similar territory. Zizek's delineation of the latter's functioning is considerably more complex and, ultimately, useful, but both ego & superego are drivers of the modern decadence perceived & unashamedly pilloried by both authors. At times their targets can seem remarkably similar, e.g. the hippy movement. Reading Booker's characterisation of this as a 'rigidly conformist' 'group fantasy' built on denigration of others felt rather like pulling a poisoned dart out of myself. (Booker goes on to describe Solzhenitsyn's own vilification of western decadencein some detail. Zizek might balk at the comparison, but, as another former Soviet Bloc dissident, feted by a West he continues to phlegmatically critique for its moral bankruptcy, he can seem like a successor of sorts.) It's fun to read contemporary moralists because they provide such a corrective to the sixties' painfully, corruptedly foggy-headed legacy of la la let it all hang out, but where Zizek is rapier-like, challenging, funny & full of surprises, Booker does ultimately just come across as a crank.
In the first section, where he lays out the seven plots of the title, I was with him all the way. Reductive? Incomplete? I can do without the pedantry at this point. You don't have to buy the system wholesale to see that Booker is here, fascinatingly, identifying patternsin storytelling that are extraordinarily consistent over thousands of years. The point is, he's giving you something you can use. In an almost Euclidian way I found myself involuntarily playing with his basic storytelling riffs to come up, giddily, with an ever more complex world of variety. I felt so inspired I thought I was going to pop. It's this section & this section alone that earns the book its stars here.
How could it have got so tangled after this? The second section is eye-wateringly repetitive, telling usin several barely varying passages how stories are peopled by a selection of archetypal figures who's function is to bring us & the hero out of darkness & into light. The same principles come up over & over again: the ultimate aim of 'seeing whole', the need to go down into darknessin order to attain light, the importance of uniting the mature masculine with the mature feminine, the need to go 'below the line' to the realms of the marginalised & oppressedin order to expose the corruption of the 'above the line' world of authority. This is not complex stuff & even if it was, it would only need to be explained well once.
Where was the editor? Asleep it seems, or overawed, because, as the book goes on, it's not just the repetition that becomes wearing, it's the increasing instance of missed out words. There's at least one indefensibly verbless sentence & also a bizarrely erroneous description of the story of Rebel Without A Cause that someone really should have spotted: Dean as a speed-obsessed hero ends by wiping himself outin a car accident. Has Booker even seen this film?
Oh well, even a fully awake editor couldn't have done much to right the book's more serious philosophical flaws, which are, I'm afraid, fatal. Booker's an old-fashioned Tory paternalist & he uses his Jungian system to inform us,in no uncertain terms & with only slightly more intellectual rigour than your average reactionary, that most of nineteenth & twentieth century literature (as well as a great deal of the music & art of this period) is immoral & therefore bad for us. There's a certain amount of shooting the messengerin all this. Booker often doesn't seem to know who his friends are. He off-handedly describes Breathless as one of various new wave films that take us through a series of largely senseless events only to end with an act of shocking violence - completely missing the fact that the film almost precisely conforms to his own description of tragic structure: anticipation followed by decisive immoral act followed by dream stage (it's all going to be OK) followed by frustration, then nightmare stage, brief renewal of hope, then destruction.
Booker can't seem to conceive of the idea that films like Breathless, Bonny & Clyde & A Clockwork Orange might be anything other than unconscious critiques of the sixties licentiousness he disapproves of. The last,in particular, he criticises on the grounds that it leaves its hero unpunished, contains untrustworthy authority figures who have pornographic sculpturesin their homes and, most egregiously of all, shows its antihero being inspired to commit acts of violence by listening to Beethoven. Booker's now childlike mind seems incapable of grasping the three key, interrelated points here a) that Alex ends up unpunished precisely because the authority figures are, themselves, hypocritical & deficientin morality - to whit the critique is deliberate, b) the pornographic sculptures are there on purpose as a sign of precisely the kind of moral & aesthetic bankruptcy that Booker bemoans & c) the Nazis listened to Beethoven too; & it's not surprising Booker misses this last, because it's the dangling thread that almost unravels the whole second half of Booker's epic paean to morally uplifting art.
Except there's worse: he lets his manichean good v. bad moralism completely blind him to more nuanced pleasures, both humane & aesthetic, of Remembrance of Things Past & Ulysses. His 'critiques' of these books, centring on Proust's 'immaturity' & Joyce's depictions of masturbation, also 'immature', read like justifications that could have been used at Nazi literary auto da fes. Everywhere, the sound of galloping right wing hobby horses becomes deafening, even as Booker tries to slipin some of his more beyond the pale prejudices by insinuation: William Burroughs' books are mischaracterised as being designed so you can read the sentencesin any order (bad) as,in the same sentence, we learn that Burroughs was a drug addict (bad) & homosexual (hmm...bad?).
Oh well. All we can do is try to avoid the same prejudiced reasoning ourselves. So I won't say Booker's argument is bad just because he uses it to be homophobic & anti-feminist, which is just my subjective view. I'll say it's bad because it's hopelessly muddled, which I'm pretty sure is inarguable. One of Booker's main themes, virtually the whole theme of the last section, is the idea that a great deal of immoral behaviour can be shown to be a result of 'ego-Self confusion'. The 'Self' (always capped)in Booker's schema is the light, balanced consciousness that 'sees whole'. It is symbolisedin stories by the attainment of harmonious unities, particularly marriage, but it is really only a psychical phenomena, attained by bringing the archetypesin one's own mind into light & balance. Booker cautions, when these archetypes are projected outwards into material goals, we become alienated from the Self & act insteadin the service of the ego.
It's an important distinction & one I find I have some sympathy with. I've been putting to good use lately: that shirt I wanted? It's actually just a representation of a certain feeling of confidence I lack. My need for a girlfriend? My need to getin touch with my anima. It's genuinely helping.
It also helps me read Booker, because it means that when he's talking about the need to go below the line socially or reconnect with nature, he's only talking about the mind. Like, he's definitely not defending Communism, which he says is a confusion of ego & Self objectives and, after all, didn't turn out too well - oh, except that its own 'below the line' darkness created heroes like Solzhenitsyn, who is real & not an archetypein your mind or mine. Nor, somewhat surprisingly, is he defending environmentalism, which he wants to tell us is also just another cultlike collective fantasy characterised by nothing but sentimentalism; he dislikes a lot of the real things that environmentalists dislike, but only, apparently, because of the effects on our minds. On the other hand, he does want to tell us that Churchill, the real life flesh & blood Churchill, was good because he was a heroic light father figure archetype, & that all that pitchingin during the Blitz was good collective behaviour, even though that was real too. He also likes Thatcher even though she was a woman embodying the same heroic light masculine qualities as Churchill & doesn't like Ripleyin Alien because she's a woman embodying heroic light masculine qualities. Oh brother. There's no consistency here. None. And the reason? Well, it's partly that Booker can't stick to his own strictly mental rule & partly that the whole Archetypes idea (as presented here), which Booker describes as being on a par with Einstein's theory of relativity & Crick & Watson's discovery of the double helix, is so nebulous that it allows him to defend & attack whatever he likes with a spuriously scientific underpinning.
In short,in an irony so dumb & obvious you think surely he would have noticed it, Booker's extended warning against the ego is seriously undermined by his own ego.
Are seven plots enough? - By: Pooter, 26 Sep 2008 
There are only three kinds of journey: the ones when you start out, & finish somewhere else; the ones where you finish back where you started; & the journeys where you go from one place, & 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 bearin 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, & he does point to things that many stories havein 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 & 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" & "voyage & 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) & comic (including any farce where events spiral out of control). "Solomon Grundy" (born on Monday, christened on Tuesday, on & so on) may not be much of a plot, but it's the basis of lots of po-faced Victorian & Edwardian novels. "The trickster" is therein 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 & Casablanca. "The merry-go-round" - the patterned repetition & recurrence of events, people & situations - is the basic plot device behind picaresque books like Candide or A Clockwork Orange, & sequential plots like La Ronde or Bunuel's Fantome de Liberte. The list could go on, & on, & on. The Seven Basic Plots is, at one & the same time, engaging, infuriating, insightful & 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 - By: Book Buff, 10 Aug 2008 This is a book of grand pretensions & 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 & Jung had never existed. It has a latent Christianity (at least a latent religiosity), homophobia & puritanism which,in this post-modern, liberal age seems disturbingly Victorian, transparently prejudiced & disqualifies the author from making the kinds of universalising claims that he makes about certain texts. Don't we livein an age of pluralism where simple binary distinctions such as 'light & dark' don't necessarily apply to people, stories, places & events? Methodologically, his arguments are crippled by such reductio ad absurdums & such abstractions render the meta-analysis of plot to his narrow Jungian taxonomy of archetypes failures of classification & analysis.
His attacks on Proust's homosexuality, masculinity & introspectiveness & on masturbationin Joyce are just two clear examples where this prejudice (which will be clear to most humanities undergraduates) is evident & which will entirely discredit the authorin academic circles. These are just the tip of the critical ice-berg. Stylistically, the book is repetitive & clearly needs editing. In terms of the endless plot summaries, if you want all the best storiesin 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 & want to see them butchered & 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 & most of the humanities have passed Mr Booker by.
While the idea, as a question, problem & research area of this book is undoubtedly an interesting one & Mr Booker should be patted on the head for reading a lot of stories & 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 & stories. Africa, Oceania, the early Americas, most of Asia, Scandinavia & South America are largely unrepresented as are plotsin other forms of culture which are not books such as art, popular culture, design & ritual. So with such a narrow sample of stories from such a narrow range of possible narrative forms & 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 & opposing ideas & 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 & nth basic plots), because their own stories are untold, to correct false tellings of their stories & 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 & force-fed back to themin seven pre-packaged portions.
Beckett, Chekhov and Orwell 'Missing the Mark'? Are you mugging me off? - By: Mr. A. Burrell, 03 Aug 2008 
I may have missed the subtleties of Mr Booker's arguments but when moving onto the section about stories that don't work & having the fellasin the title of my review mentioned I was absolutely gob smacked. He describes 1984 & Waiting for Godot amongst many others as 'flawed' & not working as stories. I presume Virginia Woolf & 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 chaptersin 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' & bodge up another Indiana Jones or Star Wars film to pay for the next four generations of your family to heat their swimming pools butin terms of an intellectual insight into stories & how they operate it shares a similar vibe with an Abu Hamza sermonin the middle of a rainy Finsbury Park road. If i've missed the point I humbly apologise but human psychology, story-telling & philosophy that fit into a comfortable 7 point plan went out of fashion with Stalin & Hitler, I hope.
