Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Such a big book, October 11, 2005
and so inefficient. Truly I felt that underneath this persnickety and overwrought tome of literary archetypes and movements lies a slimmer, more cogent and helpful book screaming to be let out.
The problem is not really apparent with the book's first half, in which Booker analyzes his seven different kinds of plot themes and finds some wonderful coincidences between, say, our commercial culture and long-banished civilizations. (Dr. No and the Gilgamesh both feature solitary heroes going to the far side of the world to vanquish fearsome and bizarre monsters.)
As far as that goes, the book is useful and will painlessly teach genre studies and even a bit of comparative literature to the eager reader. The problem comes about halfway through the book when Booker, who appears eager to stamp out not only interpretations of books but discussion of books themselves that don't fit his seven-fold structure, condemns so much of modern literature as "romanticism." Well, writers as diverse as Victor Hugo, Ayn Rand and E.T.A. Hoffman have all proudly described themselves as "romantic," and even that unwieldy tent under which to house those disparate authors is more helpful than Booker's cant, who damns the "romantic" canon as distracting literature (and its readers, of course) from its real purpose; i.e., to fit his seven-fold canon.
Not only is the argument circular, it is absurd. It is like saying that candles provide the best and most consistent indoor illumination, because that damned "electricity" isn't really a form of illumination, because . . . well, just because it isn't. In this case what started out to be a purposeful and useful argument turns into a circular begging of the issues and, for a moral Aristotelian, a singularly unsympathetic ways to limn out a canon, based on one man's experience, or should I say OPINIONS?
There are many, many books that have to do with the construction of a novel and its many themes. I think offhand of E.M. Forster's ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL; of course there are tons others. Despite its initial promise, this book, I think, is best left alone unless the reader cares to spend 600-ish pages at first reinforcing, then undermining his/her knowledge of what makes a novel tick.
|
|
|
150 of 171 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Blame the romantics, April 24, 2005
This book, which by all accounts has taken Christopher Booker 30 years to write, isn't the first attempt to distil all of storytelling down to a few archetypes. I dare say it won't be the last, either. While it's a fantastically learned, well-read, and at times insightful entry on the subject, it encounters the same problems others like Joseph Campbell have: that that the facts of actual literature tend to sit uneasily with the unifying theory, and that the unifying theory itself tends to rest on an analysis of human psychology which sounds like it might be so much bunk, and a particular world view - moral objectivism - which definitely is.
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
|
|
|
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great resource to help you write a bestselling novel or highly successful movie screenplay., September 23, 2007
I liked this book very much. It was kind of longwinded. But since it is a resource book and not a mere how-to on writing, I could overlook how long it was. The more content the better because it gave me more examples and things to think about regarding the subject matter.
The book is broken into four basic parts:
1. The 7 basic plots
2. Stories told well
3. Stories not told well
4. Why people tell stories
And the 7 basic plots are as follows:
1. Overcoming themonster
2. Rags to riches
3. A journey - the quest
4. A journey - the voyage and return
5. Comedies
6. Tragedies
7. Rebirth
This book took 34 years to write (so says the author). But I think it took so long because the author was not motivated to finish it a lot sooner. This is true even though the book is kind of heavy at 728 pages. There are many stories cited throughout the book as examples of what the author discusses. And all the stories cited are referenced in an index at the end of the book.
What I liked the most about the book was how logical and informative it was. I particularly liked the fact that I could look at the Table of Contents and pretty much tell what the book was about. As a result, reading the book was a pleasure. However, I did have to dig a little when it came to Chapter 12. At first glance I thought the author had added another plot and forgotten to tell me about it or to redo the title of the book. I probably would have liked the book better if Chapter 12 had been put someplace else.
When I read this book I also read The Writer's Journey (ISBN: 193290736X) and Story (ISBN: 0060391685). All three books compliment each other and relate to the art/process of writing a bestselling novel, drama, or movie script. I recommend if you read one, then go ahead and read all three.
At the end of this book there is a glossary of terms. I found it to be a little helpful. In fact, I found it to be very helpful when reading The Writer's Journey because that book failed to have a glossary. 5 stars!
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Ronald Tobias
by Victoria Schmidt
by Eric Bentley
by Tami D. Cowden
