Summer Reading.

It is not often that a book is published that has taken thirty-four years to gestate, whose vast frame is justified by the enormity of its scope, and which repays in fascination what it extorts in concentration. At nearly seven hundred fifty pages, Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (Continuum, $34.95, 736 pp.) is not lightly undertaken, even if you have a week overlooking a silent lake and voiceless nymphs on hand to do the cooking. But like a hero who sets out on a quest, the reader should not flinch at the mountains ahead. Treat each chapter as a gentle hill to be tackled, and the road will carry you to your reward.

Booker argues that our Western narrative is embedded in seven storytelling archetypes: overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth. Storytelling is successful, Booker notes, if the listener or reader can connect with the story immediately; readers will suspend disbelief as long as the story is true at an unconscious level--a kind of preprogrammed assent. This, of course, sounds like Jung, to whom Booker is indebted: the symbolic characters of stories--heroes, dark figures, helpers, eternal feminine figures--are, like the plots themselves, archetypes.

Each of the plots conforms to patterns of transformation. Comedy--to take but one example--is exemplified by Tom Jones and Jane Austen's novels as much as the TV-show Frasier, because the essence of comedy lies in exposing as ridiculous the state of self-delusion that affects human beings who have become isolated from the community by their egocentricity. This can be played for laughs, a harmless way of defusing the social strains created by egotism, but it can be just as true of sad novels. Comedy brings all the characters to light and unity, whereas in the first four plot types the dark figure, opposed to the hero, goes through no change of heart but is overthrown. Tragedies--Macbeth, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lolita--involve a surrender to darkness that gradually takes control of the hero's life, leading to an untimely death. Rebirth is like the "overcoming the monster" plot, except that the monster is the hero's own self, whom he vanquishes through a personal transformation.

All this would be enough for one book, but is merely part 1. Booker realized--as he recounts in a personal note at the end--that he would have to deal also with what he calls "the immense change which has come over storytelling in the past two hundred years." This is the real fascination of the work, which turns it from a brilliant analysis of stories into an astonishing cultural history. In the last two hundred years, says Booker, stories have broken with the archetypes--even while continually returning to them--as mankind has become detached from its unconscious, a phenomenon that of course gave rise to the psychoanalytical revolution of the twentieth century. The stories themselves reveal the betrayal: what drives them, in other words, is the triumph of the subjective, the egotistical, over the universal unconscious. So Moby-Dick and Frankenstein invert the "overcoming the monster" plot in such a way that the hero is the true monster, of which the monster (Frankenstein's creation, the giant whale) is a kind of reflection. Or take the James Bond films, which end with what is superficially the union of the eternal masculine and eternal feminine, but what is really the bringing together of a puer aeternus with a disposable erotic fantasy (Pussy Galore).

Much of our modern narrative, in other words, fails to connect with the intuition of unity with which human beings are born, and from which they later feel exiled. The purpose of storytelling is to reconnect us with that unity. This, too, is the purpose of religion--which may be why storytelling, with its transformative power, is a traditional gift of priests and gurus. When Booker turns to Jesus, it is astonishing what he gleans from holding up the story against the archetypes. Without ever admitting to his own belief, Booker shows how the "Jesus story" is an astonishing achievement of storytelling: a perfect resolution, the greatest narrative of all. His account of how the story went on to shape the medieval imagination, but was overthrown by the unleashing of the ego in the age of Revolution and Romanticism, should be compulsory reading for Christians wishing to understand the place of their faith narrative in human history.

Anthony Howard's long-awaited Basil Hume: The Monk Cardinal (Headline Book Publishing, London, [pounds sterling]20, 352 pp.) is the authorized biography of the former archbishop of Westminster, the fruit of privileged access to the archives in both the archbishop's residence and Hume's former domain, Ampleforth Abbey. Not a Catholic, Howard is a well-known political pundit, and the book reflects these characteristics: this is more of an external account than an intimate one, much stronger on public policy than the private man. Still, it is a well-balanced sketch that captures Hume's paradoxes and brilliance. The big issues--Hume's battle for justice for wrongly imprisoned Irish people; disagreements with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger over homosexuality; the nuclear-weapons question; his handling of the influx of Anglican priests in the early 1990s; the rapprochement he brought about between the Catholic Church and the traditionally hostile British elite--are sharply summed up in this fascinating record of English Catholic life.

Austen Ivereigh, former deputy editor of the London Tablet, is press secretary to England's Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.